Your personal thoughts on this Poem and its meaning behind it.?

Question

A Brown Girl Dead <-- Title

With two white roses on her breasts,
White candles at head and feet,
Dark Madonna of the grave she rests;
Lord Death has found her sweet.

Her mother pawned her wedding ring
To lay her out in white;
She'd be so proud she'd dance and sing
To see herself tonight

Answer 1

Instead of a wedding, the Dark Madonna is espoused to Lord Death. The bridal roses and candles are used for her wake. Instead of her wedding ring, the mother honors her with a burial gown. But she is so beautiful and the gown and her surroundings show her beauty so dramatically that, if she were living, you can just imagine her dancing and singing--as she always had, loving her dress-up clothes and the way she looks in them. The sensual brown girl (from Countee Cullen's other poems in the series) still has a physical beauty that cannot be seen as cold and formal.

The shadow of death always seems to hang over Cullen's most lovely poems. He was noted in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s as the poet who best captured the black experience in traditional forms of English poetry. The simple rhythm and meter, the ABAB rhyme of the quatrains, are classical in style and form, but the pain and wistfulness of the poem fit in with his other descriptions of the "brown" experience.

One critic has said that Cullen "wished to contrast the African-American embrace of sensuality to the 'cold' and 'repressed' code of the white middle class. In 'To a Brown Boy' he offered complementary advice: 'Lad, never dam your body's itch/When loveliness is seen.' It was an itch triggered by 'that brown girl's swagger.' Do not be fooled by white ideas of beauty, Cullen insisted. 'For there is ample room for bliss/In pride in clean, brown limbs/And lips know better how to kiss/Than how to raise white hymns.'

"In 'She of the Dancing Feet Sings,' Cullen has his 'Brown Girl,' she of 'blithe, ecstatic hips' as he put it in 'Harlem Wine,' wonder if she would be happy in the heaven described by white Christianity. '. . .what would I do in heaven, pray,' she asks. '. . .how would I thrive in a perfect place/Where dancing would be sin/With not a man to love my face/Nor an arm to hold me in?' "

In one of his most famous poems, "Yet Do I Marvel," Cullen begins, "I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind," but he concludes telllingly, "Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!"

Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston have become the best-known, most widely studied voices of the Harlem Renaissance, but no one will ever silence the gentle, poignant lyrics (like this one) of Countee Cullen.

Answer 2

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
Your personal thoughts on this Poem and its meaning behind it.?
A Brown Girl Dead <-- Title

With two white roses on her breasts,
White candles at head and feet,
Dark Madonna of the grave she rests;
Lord Death has found her sweet.

Her mother pawned her wedding ring
To lay her out in white;
She'd be so proud she'd dance and sing
To see...

Answer 3

Yes, it's possible

Answer 4

It's kind of beautiful but sad.As for the meaning behind it,don't you think that is obvious?

Answer 5

wow! this poem is deep and good. who wrote it?anyway,to me this means that her daughter died and to make her look pretty she pawned her wedding ring.i think that when the poem states"She'd be so proud she'd dance and sing
To see herself tonight",it means that she wished that it was her who was dead and not her daughter.

Answer 6

she has died, but its not sad really, it was expected of everyone and she was happy that she was out of whatever pain, only the ones who didnt understand mourned, though she died happy

this is a weird, dark poem!

Answer 7

Valuable topic, just what I was looking for.

Answer 8

To me, it is saying that we only have dignity after we die.

Answer 9

thanks! Extremely valuable information and offers me better knowledge on this topic