My Dreams Must Wait Till After Hell Analysis

Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Till After Hell,” emphasizes the role that dreams play in the narrator’s life. This traditional sonnet is included in the collection, “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” that introduces the narrators as young soldiers recently returned from war. Favored by writers in the Harlem Renaissance, Brooks wrote the collection in strict sonnet format with iambic pentameter. Yet, the poem does not mirror the rigidity of the sonnet because of Brooks’ careful use of enjambment. Written in the present tense, with a final couplet in the hypothetical future, Brooks’ poem does not have a concrete sense of past. The tone of “My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Till After Hell,” is heavy. It’s written in off-rhyme style, intentionally simple that seems to serve as a cautionary tale about belittling the importance of dreams. The narrator in the Brooks poem, introduces …show more content…
In the couplet, Brooks revisits the overarching theme of the importance of dreams. By writing with the same subjects of bread and honey from the opening line, Brooks gives the poem a circular, completed effect, a response to “I am incomplete,” (Brooks 5). This is the narrator’s final goal, that they won’t be “insensitive” to their dreams, that they won’t forget despite their many distractions and delays in achieving them. The luster and purity of old dreams will never fade. In “My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Till After Hell,” Brooks and the narrator know that dreams are important, even if they are repressed and locked up in cabinets of “will.” Dreams will lend strength when in darkness, but they are so closely interwoven with a person’s identity that they cannot be taken away, they will haunt and they will