A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon

“A Bronzeville Mother Loiters” is written in free verse, meaning that Brooks does not adhere to any specific formal or metrical rules. Although the poem alludes to the ballad form—which is often rhymed and written in quatrains—“A Bronzeville Mother Loiters” is not written in quatrains or rhymed. In a particularly postmodern twist on form and meter, Brooks’s primary concern with the ballad form in this poem is its deconstruction. The poem is structured conceptually so that the ballad form is referenced and cast at the beginning, then is slowly deconstructed, in content and form, throughout the remainder of the poem. Even as the speaker sets up the rules and archetypes of the ballad, Brooks deconstructs the speaker’s view by purposefully avoiding set line lengths and rhymes, choosing instead to structure the poem formally around symbols and allusions.

Brooks’s poem is built upon allusions to the ballad form, and the ultimate falsehood of the speaker’s fantasy is wrapped in the trappings of romance. In order to fully analyze the speaker’s mindset, Brooks has to set-up the ballad allusion and then deconstruct it to illustrate its inability to live up to the brutality and violence of Emmett Till’s murder.