my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell

“Will V-Day Be Me-Day Too?” by Langston Hughes (1944)

Langston Hughes was a key member of the Harlem Renaissance and has become a central figure in the American literary canon. Hughes, too, wrote poems about World War II. Like “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell,” some of his World War II poems omit the overt mention of race, but “Will V-Day Be Me-Day Too?” features an explicitly Black soldier speaker. Similar to Brooks’s soldier, Hughes’s soldier endures hell as he watches a “buddy” die in combat. Yet Hughes’s soldier isn’t interested in bread, honey, and old purity. His soldier wonders, “Will Dixie lynch me still / when I return?” What is foremost on this soldier's mind is whether the United States will remain a deadly racist nation.

“love note II: flags” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1945)

In “Notes for a Prospective Biographer: Remembrances on Gwendolyn Brooks’s Hundredth Birthday” (2017), Evelyn White reads the sonnets in “Gay Chaps at the Bar” as if gay signaled a sexual identity. White discovers many suggestive, homoerotic passages in the sonnets. In “love note II: flags,” there’s the “scattered pound” of “cold passion” and a “tender struggle.” Putting this poem and White’s interpretation of it in conversation with “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell,” a queer reading of the latter becomes possible. Maybe the soldier’s concern with honey, bread, and domesticity is Brooks’ way of subverting gender or suggesting something about the soldier’s sexual identity.

“We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1960)

“We Real Cool” is Brooks’s most famous poem. Brooks subverts the idea that war is glorious in “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell,” and she undercuts the romanticization of unfettered rebellion in “We Real Cool.” War isn’t cool, and neither is a life centered on pleasure. Narrated by pool players, Brooks’s poem shows that what fate has in store for people who only seek thrills is often dangerous or fatal. Unlike the soldier in the sonnet, the pool players in this famous lyric don’t come across as thoughtful and gentle but as uncritical and arrogant.