19 pages • 38 minutes read
Ulysses
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Themes
The World as a Perilous Journey
By comparing school children to the warriors of The Odyssey [See: Literary Context], Brooks suggests that their world is also filled with violence. Brooks sharply divides the streets of Chicago from the children's homes, as she gives the line describing how they “go into the world” (Line 5) its own stanza. Brooks’s centering of the Black experience reveals the differences for children of color when they leave their homes. Unlike the common assumption that school is a safe place for learning, instead it is a battlefield. In the poem, Black children are depicted like warriors entering a battle, with the students who “bring knives pistols bottles, little boxes, and cans” (Line 10) to school. Education takes second place to the physical danger students feel in the world, and this process repeats every day, with the journey through this treacherous geography continuing day after day. And like Ulysses lost at sea, bouncing from island to island, these children reject the geography their teachers "feed" (Line 13) them, using their own methods to navigate out of this perilous journey.
Coming Home
Brooks sharply separates home from the world. To mark leaving and entering the home, Brooks places a single line stanza to function as a threshold between spaces. The world and home are presented as opposing places. The world is filled with temptation and conflict. Home is a place of unity. Because of this separation, the family is pictured as capable of “holding Love” (Line 3, 18) amongst themselves, regardless of what happens when they leave the home.
This depiction of home echoes the portrayal of home for Odysseus in the Odyssey. Like the characters of “Ulysses,” Odysseus faces many temptations after the Trojan War and his return home is equally complicated. Instead of immediately greeting his wife, he instead creates an elaborate scheme to test her fidelity, despite his own sexual affairs on the journey. Yet their eventual reunion as a family is presented as a happy ending, much as this poem presents the safe return home as desirable when compared to the outside world.
The Failed Treatment of Children
The child’s perspective is a key feature of Brooks’s criticism of the failure of adults and society at large. Ulysses’s naive perspective on adult actions results in him uncritically accepting the actions of those adults around him. He is young enough to still call his parents “Daddy” (Line 6) and “Mommy” (Line 7) and he accepts their infidelity without question or judgment. The questionable man at the schoolyard gate is “cool” (Line 11). Adults fail to notice the children bringing weapons to school or engaging in unsafe activities on the playground. Ulysses accepts these actions as normal. Brooks intends for her adult reader to react with horror, as their adult perspective allows them to more critically reflect on the actions of the adults. She uses the poem to draw attention to the real-world situation in the South Side of Chicago. Because the adults and the society described in the poem have failed the children, Brooks hopes to inspire her readers to work towards change in the real world.
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By Gwendolyn Brooks
