A Summary and Analysis of Gwendolyn Brooks’ ‘The Crazy Woman’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Crazy Woman’ is a poem by the American poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000). It was published in her 1960 collection The Bean Eaters. In the poem, a self-described ‘crazy woman’ announces her determination to sing as she pleases, however controversial her song might be or however unacceptable society may find her song to be.

Summary

The speaker of the poem – the ‘crazy woman’ of the poem’s title – begins by announcing that she is not going to sing a ‘May song’, because a song for the month of May should be jolly and uplifting. Instead, she plans to wait until the cold, dark month of November comes around, and then she will sing a ‘gray’ song that is drab, miserable, and downbeat (and thus appropriate for the month of November).

In the second stanza, she repeats her intention to wait until November to sing her song, because that is the right time of year to suit her personality and mood. When November arrives, she intends to step outside into the dark, frosty world and sing a dirge or other miserable song. (The word ‘terribly’ here means the song will inspire awe or terror, rather than that her singing will be bad!)

The third stanza sees the ‘crazy’ woman predicting the reaction of the people who hear her song. These people – who are ‘little’ to her – will stare at her, she thinks, and say to each other that she is ‘the Crazy Woman’ who refused to sing back in Maytime.

Analysis

Gwendolyn Brooks herself stated that all of her early work, this poem included, was political, and it’s clear that the ‘crazy woman’ of this poem is a representative not just of women in general but specifically of black women living in the US in the mid-twentieth century. Victims of segregation and discrimination, and with a usually limited range of career options (becoming a wife being the path most women took, sometimes out of a lack of other meaningful alternatives), African-American women in 1950s America had more cause than most to feel like singing a sad song.

And the song is clearly symbolic in Brooks’s poem. Singing a song is even, we might say, a symbol of Brooks herself as poet: the crazy woman sings her song, but how ‘crazy’ is she? In the poem, the woman predicts that society will call her the ‘Crazy Woman’ when they hear her sing, but why she expects to be labelled as ‘crazy’ is far from clear.

After all, the speaker of the poem is defiant but not perverse in her ambitions: she chooses to remain silent in May because the mood of joy and celebration which dominates that month is out of key with her own emotional mood; she will sing her ‘song of gray’, but she will choose to wait until the appropriate time to sing it, nevertheless.

This sounds like a sensible decision rather than a crazy one. Singing a November song in May would invite the charge of madness or a flouting of social convention; similarly, singing a May song in November would be to be untrue to oneself by adopting a happy voice, or mask, which belied how one was really feeling underneath.

So the craziness stems not from flouting convention but rather from choosing to remain silent and wait for one’s time to speak: the woman wishes to confront the grim realities of her lot as an African-American woman facing discrimination and hardship, but she is going to wait for the moment when the song will resonate with her audience, nevertheless.

Despite the song being appropriate to the time she sings it, she still expects to be written off as ‘the Crazy Woman’ by society: they will hear her song but not heed it, or rather choose to dismiss her as mad or unconventional, presumably so they don’t have to address the reality of which she sings.

All of this is not to say that Brooks’ poem is not quietly rebellious, a protest song of sorts: note that the woman in her poem is prepared to give as good as she gets, and if the people will seek to ignore her by giving her a label (‘the Crazy Woman’), she can similarly write them off as ‘the little people’ (small-minded, petty, toeing the line and pursuing the status quo).

Form

The poem takes the form of quatrains or four-line stanzas, rhymed abcb. This rhyme scheme recalls the ballad metre, although ballads tend to have alternating eight-syllable and six-syllable lines, whereas most of Brooks’s odd lines have seven rather than eight syllables. So, if we want to be technical, we can say the poem is written in iambic trimeter, because each line contains three iambs, a light stress followed by a heavy stress.

For example, consider the fourth line of the poem: ‘A MAY song SHOULD be GAY.’ The italicised words carry the heavy stresses in the line, while the non-italicised words (‘A’, ‘song’, ‘be’) are lightly stressed. But note that in the first and third lines of the stanzas (at least in most cases), there is an extra lightly stressed syllable – what’s known as a hypermetrical stress – at the end of the trimeter line. For example, in the first line of the second stanza: ‘I’ll WAIT un-TIL No-VEM-ber’ (where the ‘-ber’ at the end of the line is the hypermetrical stress).

Unlike most ballads, ‘The Crazy Woman’ is a lyric rather than a narrative poem, because it outlines the thoughts and feelings of an individual speaker rather than telling a story. Nevertheless, the poem’s fixed form is significant.

Form, we are told, is political, and we could argue that the stanza form Gwendolyn Brooks utilises in ‘The Crazy Woman’ has a political significance. The choice of a strict verse form may be a reflection of the social strictures black women faced during the late 1950s, when Brooks wrote the poem.

It’s worth bearing in mind that the Civil Rights movement was still in its infancy: the March on Washington would not happen until 1963, and although the shockwaves attendant upon the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956 were still being felt, the US still had some way to go before segregation and state-sanctioned discrimination were a thing of the past.