The Sonnet-Ballad (Themes)

Themes

Death

In this poem, death is personified as a woman who is trying to seduce the speaker’s lover. This, of course, is quite a reversal of the normal expectations, since soldiers going to war are expected to avoid death, not embrace it. Brooks is isolating a psychological fascination that draws men into dangerous situations, an attraction to dying that is not often acknowledged, especially not by “hard” or insensitive people. The very reason this fascination is present is that it is denied. The word “coquettish” refers to the behavior of somebody who flirts by playing hard-to-get; someone who acts shy and all the while is in command of the courtship. Death, then, is shown as being attractive exactly because it is forbidden. It is called “impudent,” which means bold or rude, and “strange,” and it is these qualities that the speaker’s lover is unfamiliar with that make her worry that he might end up attracted to death. She identifies an element of beauty about death, a beauty that has been recognized by artists throughout history, especially those who have painted or sculpted the “Angel of Death,” but she takes no steps toward identifying exactly what death’s beauty might be. After being seduced, the speaker fears that her lover will say “yes” to death: in this poem, dying in battle is voluntary and does not happen without the victim’s consent. This could reflect a concern that the soldier will let his guard down, make a mistake, forget a detail, or in some other way allow himself to die by failing to defend his life in every possible way.

Coming of Age

At the most obvious level, this poem shows the coming of age of the speaker’s lover, who walked off to war “grandly” only to be seduced by death. The ability to understand that we all die is often considered to be one way to define consciousness. It is an identifying factor that separates humans from animals: some translations of the Bible say that the apple Adam and Eve ate, causing them to fall into sin, came from the “tree of knowledge,” while others translate it as “the tree of life and death.” “The Sonnet-Ballad dramatizes the lover’s change, having him “hesitate” and “stammer” as if the speaker were there at the moment of his change — with him and watching him.

The speaker of “The Sonnet-Ballad,” Annie Allen, also comes of age in this poem. In the context of the entire collection of poems of which this one is a part, she changes when her lover changes: he comes back from the war and rejects her for being too gentle and sweet, which drives her to misery and then, after his death, to prostitution, her innocence having been drained from her when he lost his. Outside of this context, though, using just the information that is provided in “The Sonnet-Ballad,” we can see the poem’s speaker being drawn out of her childhood naivete and into an open-eyed and somewhat frightened understanding of what the world holds for her. On one level, a childishly romantic level, she is crushed because her lover is gone and her “heart-cup” is empty. In itself, this sadness would be worthy of a poem, but Brooks goes on to indicate a higher level of consciousness by starting and ending the poem with Annie crying out to her mother in confusion. This implies that she is entering a new life, an adult life in which her mother’s experience can help her understand why things cannot always be happy. The speaker of this poem foresees what will change in her lover’s life, but she is not sure what this will mean for herself.

Victimization

The real culprit in this poem, as it is presented, is the unspecified “them” who “took” the lover away, eventually testing his self-control and breaking the speaker’s heart. “They,” of course, refers to the recruitment division of the armed forces, but to this speaker it also means social forces so far beyond her control or understanding that she cannot even conceive of a name for them. She is a girl who enjoys life, dreams, and love to such an extent that adversity is a mystery. In personifying the lover’s recruitment, she is viewing it as something that is done to him and her, as if the young lovers were specifically targeted. Later in the poem, she personifies death as another woman who is competing with her for her lover’s affection. She feels she has even less chance against this force than she did against “them,” because death makes such a direct effort to take what is hers. In neither case does the speaker seem to believe that she or her lover are capable of defending themselves, nor does she show any theory of why they have been chosen for victimization in the first place. This is Brooks’s early characterization of Annie, who develops self-assertiveness later in the sequence of poems, at least enough to take the responsibility for her troubles. Here, though, her innocence cannot avoid being victimized by the world in which she lives.