Although the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s informs the poem and Brooks’s work, Brooks felt the need to counter what her biographer George Kent calls “the exotic vein of the Harlem Renaissance” ( A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, the University of Kentucky Press, 1990).
Like the other sonnets in the sequence, letters from Black soldiers served as inspiration, so it’s safe to assume the soldier is Black. Although the poem doesn’t explicitly mention race or World War II, the poem is a part of a section of poems in A Street in Bronzeville titled “Gay Chaps at the Bar” (with gay likely connoting jubilance and not a sexual identity).
Gwendolyn Brooks is the author of the World War II sonnet “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell.” The poem, published in her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), is about a Black soldier heading off to fight in hell or World War II-the deadliest war in history.
