kitchenette building Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks · Leaving Cert Poetry

A short, cramped poem that asks one big question: can a dream survive when you are too busy paying rent and waiting for the bathroom to come free?

Context

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 to 2000) grew up in Chicago and became the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1950. This poem comes from her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), which looks closely at the lives of ordinary Black Americans in her own neighbourhood. A “kitchenette” was a tiny flat carved out of a larger building, shared bathroom down the hall, families packed in tight. That is your setting. Brooks is not writing about herself here. She speaks for a whole community stuck in the same squeeze, which is why the poem opens not with “I” but with “we”. Keep that in mind for Ordinary Level: every choice she makes is about a group.

Key Moments

The poem begins by telling you what these people are made of, and it is not flattering. They are worn down by routine and by plans they never chose.

“We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan”kitchenette building

Then Brooks weighs the word “dream” against the words that actually fill these people’s days. Notice how small and silly the dream is made to sound next to the hard nouns of survival.

“‘Dream’ makes a giddy sound, not strong / Like ‘rent,’ ‘feeding a wife,’ ‘satisfying a man’”kitchenette building

The middle of the poem is one long question: could a dream even breathe in a place like this, surrounded by cooking smells and rubbish? The turn comes at the very end. The answer is no, and it arrives in the most ordinary way possible, with a neighbour finally vacating the shared bathroom.

“Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now, / We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it”kitchenette building

That is the whole arc. Dream raised, dream tested, dream dropped for warm-ish water.

Key Themes

The biggest theme is poverty versus aspiration. Brooks is not saying these people have no dreams. She is asking whether a dream can stay alive when every hour is spoken for. The poem leans towards “no”, and it does so without preaching. A second theme is cramped communal living: the building is crowded, the bathroom is shared, and privacy does not exist. A third is dehumanisation. People here are reduced to objects and even to a number. Link the themes back to that final image of the lukewarm water: survival wins, the dream loses, quietly.

Literary Devices

The clearest device is the contrast between the airy and the concrete. Brooks gives the dream beautiful, floating language, then crushes it under kitchen reality.

“But could a dream send up through onion fumes / Its white and violet”kitchenette building

Look at the diction that turns people into objects: “things”, and the grim repetition in “Grayed in, and gray”. They are not described as men and women but as worn, colourless matter. Brooks also uses a person reduced to a number, “Number Five”, which is one of the saddest small touches in the poem and worth quoting in an answer. The sense of squalor is built through smell and decay, with the garbage “ripening in the hall”. And the collective “we” running through every stanza keeps reminding you this is shared experience, not one person’s bad day.

Mood

The mood is tired and trapped, but never self-pitying. Brooks keeps a clear, almost matter-of-fact tone, which makes the bleakness land harder. There is a flicker of longing in the middle when she imagines the dream singing “an aria down these rooms”, and then that flicker is snuffed out fast: “We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!” The exclamations there are not excited, they are weary, almost embarrassed at having hoped. By the close, the mood has settled into plain resignation. Wanting warm water is all the dreaming these people can afford.

Conclusion

This is a short poem doing a big job. In thirteen lines Brooks shows you how poverty does not just empty your pockets, it shrinks what you are allowed to hope for. The dream never even gets through the front door, beaten back by fumes, rubbish and a queue for the bathroom. For Ordinary Level, hold onto the simple shape: a community that is too ground down to dream, a dream tested against real life, and an ending where lukewarm water is the only victory available. Say what the poem feels like, back it with one or two of the quotes above, and you have a solid answer.

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More Ordinary Level 2027 poems: Mammy Dozes by Colette Bryce and If Love Was Jazz by Linda France.