Gwendolyn Brooks by Anthony Walton
...s with me.” Walton creates that paradox to represent his concern with the injustices suffered in Chicago—that although he might not always have them in mind, he cares for them. Then the boy stares and accuses Walton of his “more callous than neglect” indifference. He concludes the first stanza by revealing that his only method of alleviating his guilt of indifference towards people like the boy in the poem is “condescension.” The second stanza is an extension of the first. In it Walton imagines the boy at an age of “ten or fifteen” on a street corner with other beggars surrounding a burning barrel. The poverty surrounding this now teenager is detailed as Walton says the “everything surrounding [the boy was] vacant or for sale.” Walton continues to relate that he imagines the teenager taking a train to “Joliet or Menard.” Those towns, as told by Walton, are places that vagabonds easily adapt to due to their abundance of teenage vagabonds like the teenager in the poem. Walton criticizes society when he says that it looks down on vagabonds and claims that they are “so hard to see.” They are only sought for the purpose to be incorporated in “case studies” and nothing more. The poem’s third and last stanza summarizes the past two by incorporating numbers and adjectives. “One and a half million [vagabonds] suffer from “Poverty, pain, [and] shame.” Their dreams are suppressed from the day they were born in to this unjust society. In the middle of this third stanza Walton returns his narrative to the young four year old boy we saw in the first stanza. Walton imagines him wandering the “wind tunnels of Robert Taylor, ...