The Power and Paradox of a Sonnet by Gwendolyn Brooks

Here’s a poem about patience, about self-control, about the need to conserve your energy and constrain your desire. Fittingly enough, it’s a proper old-school sonnet, orderly and elegant: 14 lines of iambic pentameter, crisply punctuated, with syllables cut to measure.

But like a great many sonnets — most famously the 154 written by William Shakespeare — “my dreams, my works” is part of a sequence. Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) was a modern master of the form. This one comes from her first collection, “A Street in Bronzeville,” published in 1945 and named for the working-class Black neighborhood in Chicago where she grew up.

The book illuminates the lives of Bronzeville’s residents through a series of snapshots, character studies and monologues in various lengths and styles. Brooks’s lyrical gifts are matched by a novelist’s eye and psychological insight — talents on display in her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Annie Allen” and her only book of fiction, “Maud Martha.”

“A Street in Bronzeville” is a book full of faces and voices. It closes with a cluster of sonnets, gathered under the subtitle “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” that adopt the perspectives, the personae, of Black soldiers fighting in World War II. In their blend of bravado and vulnerability, these poems capture the anxieties and aspirations of men facing a double battle: against fascism overseas and racism at home.

The reader, opening the box she has placed in our hands, completes the circuit and discovers a new feeling. One word for that is empathy. A better one is electricity.