First Fight, Then Fiddle...

After reading "We Real Cool" I decided to look at more Gwendolyn Brooks because I've read some other works of hers and I always enjoy them.

"First Fight, Then Fiddle" Is a traditional petrarchan sonnet. The Norton talks about stanzas and how they break up different thoughts, here Brooks breaks up her thoughts in two different "sections" so the first 8 lines have one idea, while the next 4 have a different idea. The poem has a Couplet as well at the end of the poem.

The first 8 lines of the poem are about positive things, which is strange because in the title she tells you to first fight, then fiddle, but here she is talking about tings like fiddling first. So in the beginning, there is no mention of anything violent, she mentions imagery such as "ply the slipping string," which drives home the idea of mentioning the act of fiddling before one goes to fight.

Once the reader gets to the 9th line, there is a sudden change in tone, it goes from pleasant to violent by using language such as "A while from malice and from murdering." In these next four lines she talks about war, and how ugly and dehumanizing it is. She makes it clear that people are senseless during a war by telling the reader to, "be deaf to music, and to beauty blind." She also shows how people need to forget their emotions when their fighting a war, by leaving behind "harmony." The mainly one syllable rhymes also gives the poem a rough feel to it, like "sing thing, hate late," it makes the poem sharp like a war.