19 pages • 38-minute read
Ulysses
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Symbols & Motifs
Prayer and Singing
Prayer has played an important part in Black Americans’ lives since slavers brought the first Africans to the colonies. Spirituals blended the various African cultures with their experiences in slavery. The trauma of their life led to deep expressions of faith, hope, and grief. To this day, Black Americans are statistically more likely to identify as religious and Black churches are often portrayed as more communal with a proliferation of music. By referencing prayer and song, Brooks grounds the poem in the Black experience while also drawing a parallel between the struggles of Blacks throughout history and the present in Chicago schools.
Drawing upon her overarching allusion to Classical epic poetry, her initial use of prayer also recalls how a warrior might pray before battle. These students leave the relative safety of home to enter the dangers of the world that include their schools. But by also ending the poem with the family praying again, Brooks suggests the family has sinned throughout the day and now seeks absolution.
Geography
In describing the students’ school day, Brooks specifically draws attention to how the students are taught geography. This choice of subject is pointedly ironic, as Brooks mentions a subject that studies the world to contrast with the failed promise of how education should broaden a child’s world and give them better opportunities. By studying the larger world, the smaller world of their neighborhood is overlooked, even ignored. Education becomes another act of colonialism, rather than an opportunity to engage with cultures from around the world. The children reject this education, both the positive and the negative, when they “spit it out in a hurry” (Line 14).
The reference to geography also connects to the wide geographic terrain that Odysseus travels during his trip home. Yet unlike Odysseus’s ten years long journey, the children are quick to get home. This compression of time and distance between war and home underscores the urgency of the problem located close to the reader’s own home.
The Girl Friend
In the poem, despite the seemingly close-knit depiction of the family in the opening stanza, each of Ulysses's parents has a "Girl Friend" (Lines 6, 8) on the side. The revelation of this detail, delivered in the neutral voice of the child, comes as a shock to the adult reader. "Girl Friend" (Lines 6, 8) is always capitalized, indicating an emphasis and perhaps a formality for this third (and fourth) person on the family's periphery. The moment the adults leave the home, they begin their double lives. In the case of the father, the "Girl Friend" (Lines 6, 8) symbolizes the father's urgent desire—his lack of self-control evident as he "speeds" (Line 6) to "break bread" (Line 6) with the other woman. In contrast, the mother is depicted as in control and an authority, for she is "a Boss" (Line 7). But this image is also undermined in the next line where the child essentially "outs" her as a lesbian who also has a "Girl Friend" (Line 8). While the mother seems to carry more authority than the husband, her relationship with a woman is more hidden; contained between parentheses, almost like a whispered aside, the son tells the reader "(She too has a nice Girl Friend)" (Line 8).
The "Girl Friend" (Line 6, 8) comes to symbolize the double life many adults lead when they leave the home, and how this manifests differently for mothers and fathers. The appearance of the girlfriends first in the line of dangers outside of the home shows also that children are quite aware of the hypocrisies of their parents, but are even more accepting of the "nice Girl Friend" (Line 8), while the parents fail to address the rift at the center of the home. Instead, after a day with their respective girlfriends, the parents reunite with the family at home to go through their rituals, giving thanks for the unity they have at home, even if that is the only place it exists. If the children are aware of their parents' infidelities, how do they view the homecoming, the prayers, and the "holding Love" (Lines 3, 18) every day? Or, like Ulysses returning home to a welcoming wife after his own infidelities, does the poem demonstrate that the sins of the outside world are no match for the love of the family? The poem leaves the answer ambiguous, as the family sings "hallelujah" (Line 19) for each of their safe return.
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