The birth in a narrow room

Although the character of Annie Allen, whose first years this poem chronicles, will grow as an adult to grapple with loneliness, poverty, death, and segregation, the poem offers the child as a symbol of raw energy and pure possibility, a child who is “[b]lurred and stupendous. Wanted and unexpected” (Line 2). The poem works on the distance between what we understand and what the child realizes. For now, the child apparently seems oblivious to its racial or gender or economic identities.

The baby, apparently unexpected but still loved, symbolizes brash reckless exploration. The opening stanza records the grasping eye typical of a newborn dazzled by a world outside themselves. Without pattern (that would impose a very adult sort of logic), the first stanza moves about the furnishings of the home, showing the child’s fascination with things. In the second stanza, the child indulges the reach of the unfettered imagination that allows, for a time, the world not to be limited by what it is. In this, Brooks’s child symbolizes hope, a principle of optimism and expectation that will perhaps someday curve into disappointment and regret. All too soon, the child must settle into a grown-up world of outhouses and discarded jelly jars.