"The Bean Eaters" by Gwendolyn Brooks

The Bean Eaters by Gwendolyn Brooks : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.


I like the simplicity of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Bean Eaters,” but notice also the subtle rhyming and the long last line’s break in structure and expectation, all of which adds complexity and surprise. Why the details Brooks’ selects in that final line? Why this ordering of them? Why end the poem on “fringes”?

Her characters are nothing like me and everything like me—as well as scores of other people I’ve known. We might compare it to Ciardi’s “For Instance” (Banjo52, Feb. 17). Both poems outline kinds of people and patterns of lives, but both works also manage to see their characters as individuals. Don't they?

I don’t think I could care this much about a mere category of human. For some reason—is it the poets’ affection for their characters?—neither poem shrinks its people to types or formulas; they are humans with histories, and they matter, even though they also represent thousands with roughly similar histories.

The Bean Eaters by Gwendolyn Brooks : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.


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