An Analysis of Brooks First Fight.Then Fiddle Essay -- First Fight.Th

An psychoanalysis of digest First Fight.Then Fiddle Gwendolyn Brooks First fight. Then Fiddle. initially seems to argue for the extremity of brutal struggle in order to create a situation for the pursuit of beautiful device. The meter is more complex, however, because it also implies both that state of war cannot protect art and that art should not justify war. Yet if Brooks seems, paradoxically, to argue against art within a work of art, she does so in order create an artwork that by its really recognition of arts be would justify itself. Brooks initially seems to argue for the necessity of war in order to create a unattackable space for artistic creation. She suggests this motif quite forcefully in the paired short sentences that open the poem First fight. Then fiddle. one(a) must fight before bantam for two reasons. First, accepting the violin would be a foolish mismanagement if an enemy were threatening ones safety it would be, as the phrase goes, small-minded era Rome burns. Second, fighting the war low gear would prepare a safe and prosperous place where one could reasonably pursue the pleasures of music. One has to down a space / Wherein to play your violin with grace. It should be noted further that age Brooks writes about securing a civilized place to play the violin, she seems clearly to be using this playing as an image for art in general, as her more expansive references to beauty or concord suggest. Nonetheless, much that Brooks writes about the necessity to fight before fiddling indicates the she does not support this idea, at least not fully. For example, Brooks describes reservation beautiful music as being remote / A while from malice and murdering. In addition to the negative way Brooks describes war in this line, ... ...ultural prestige of violin playing. Indeed, as an emblem of Western politeness (one thinks of Renaissance sonnets), the sonnet might be involved in the very justification of the destruction of other less civilized peoples that the poem condemns. One might wonder why Brooks produces verse, especially the sonnet, if she also condemns it. I would suggest that by critically reckoning the costs of sonnet-making Brooks brings to her poetry a self-awareness that might justify it after all. She creates a poetry that, standardised the violin playing she invokes, sounds with hurting love. This hurting love reminds us of those who whitethorn have been hurt in the name of the love for poetry. But in giving recognition to that hurt, it also fulfills a promise of poetry to be more than a superficial social grace, to teach us something we first did not, or did not wish to, see.