Poem of the Week 2024/7

The Bean Eaters

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.

Dinner is a casual affair.

Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,

Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.

Two who have lived their day,

But keep on putting on their clothes

And putting things away.

And remembering . . .

Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,

As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that

    is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,

    tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

– Gwendolyn Brooks

Today is Saint Valentine's Day, so here is an exquisite love poem, but it's also Ash Wednesday, so here's a reflective & even melancholy poem.

Brooks defines her old Black couple – "this old yellow pair"; yellow in this context means a light-skinned Black person of mixed race descent – as bean eaters. Why? Beans are wholesome, filling, & inexpensive fare; inexpensive is the key word here. Nothing is fancy about their meals; plain is repeated twice in the third line to describe the plates & furniture they use for eating. These two are clearly marginal, socially & economically: they are mixed race but visibly Black in a racist country, they are old in a country that has always valued youth. The beans are just one of the elements that let us know they make do with what they have: their plates are chipped, their table (not even dignified by being referred to as such) is bare wood, & it is both plain & creaking; they have no silverware, but only flatware made of cheap tin. Beans are ordinary food for ordinary people. Beans suggest food eaten by country folk, who struggle to make a living from the land (there's a possible hint here of the couple's past; perhaps, like Brooks & her family, they were Southerners who moved north to Chicago during the Great Migration). Like the beans they subsist on, this couple isn't fancy or flashy – more solid, salt-of-the-earth types, & as those terms suggest, not really noticeable or memorable. But beans power a lot of the world's people. And it's suggestive that we see our couple in the context of their daily dinner: a casual affair it may be, but it is still a social occasion, bringing these two together as part of a daily & sustaining ritual.

The second stanza reinforces the idea that these two are fairly ordinary (or ordinary-seeming) people; neither brilliant nor terribly bad, they are . . . Mostly Good. The initial caps on the phrase are slightly comic, as if the pair were being rated on some scale, celestial or bureaucratic or both. No greatness in either the good or bad directions! The caps also help lend an air of finality to the judgment; these are lives that are, in all but a technical sense, over, & this is the official assessment. This theme takes over the rest of the stanza. They have lived their day. & yet, here they are still, going through the standard motions of a life. They keep putting on their clothes (which suggests getting up & starting the day) & putting things away (which suggests cleaning up as the day ends). A day-by-day routine, of not much interest.

So far Brooks has shown us her couple from outside. In the third stanza, she moves inward. As they move through their daily routines, their lives mostly over, those lives reappear in the shifting shape of memories. & they react to these memories with both twinklings & twinges (& can your life be considered truly over if you are still reacting to your memories of the past?). Twinklings suggests happier memories, & twinges moments of regret. Again, there's nothing extreme about this Mostly Good couple: twinklings rather than joy, twinges rather than searing pain. Has age gentled down their reactions, or were they always like this? Nothing tells us, one way or the other; another bit of mystery around this seemingly mundane couple.

So far in the poem, the lines have been short & descriptive, with most lines rhyming in a pleasing but unobtrusive way, lines as plain as the couple. The third stanza also begins with short lines, but the ellipsis after the first line signals a break, to the movement inward mentioned above: first we get the mention of their remembering, then in the second line we get some of their reactions to their memories (our first sign of their interior lives), & then the third line blooms out to complete the poem. The line is not completely alien in tone to the rest; it begins with the sort of light rhyming we've been seeing (as they lean over the beans: not quite a perfect rhyme, & perhaps that little disjunction in sound is a reminder of the difference between what we're seeing outside the couple & what they are feeling inside); the line  continues with a reminder of their social & economic status (not only a rented room, but a back room).

But the line, easily the longest in the poem, then unfurls with a wonderfully eclectic list of the detritus of a life: it begins & ends with a suggestion of past frivolity & fanciness: beads & fringes. Where do they come from? from fancy old clothes that have gradually fallen apart? from broken necklaces? Is the fringe from old-fashioned furnishings, perhaps something brought up from whatever country they moved from, something filled for them, though not for anyone else, with memories of those buried back in that past? Vases: it's funny how vases accumulate. There are no flowers in these vases, but there must have been, once. Where did the vases come from? Where did the flowers go to? Why does the couple keep them? & the dolls: survivals of a childhood, & if so, their own, or perhaps that of some child of theirs now long gone? Cloths: dust cloths? dust covers? scraps saved for some thrifty purpose? Receipts & tobacco crumbs: the flotsam & jetsam of everyday life, but suggestive of a certain level of pleasure or pleasure-seeking. The items are shared between the two: we might assume that the dolls belong to the woman, & the tobacco crumbs to the man, though maybe not; maybe the dolls are from his childhood, & maybe she smoked. They are pooled together, part of a life shared for so long there is no separation between their things. The items listed are nothing special, simply the things that accumulate around us in the course of life, though enriched for the couple by their remembering. We are not given any of their memories, only this array of physical items, which their rented room is full of (the use of full here is our first indication of something other than humble surroundings for this couple, our first suggestion of abundance). The length of the list & its variety reinforce a concluding sense of abundance associated with this couple & their circumscribed lives, even though the items listed are mostly humble & everyday odds & ends, & we never find out what exactly they mean to the couple. We are told that this old pair remembers, but not what they remember. They share these things, but only with each other, not with us. We see only that they do share an intimacy. We do not share in that intimacy, but we end by seeing that it is there, a mystery & a blessing illuminating these two people who had appeared so plain & dull.

I took this from Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks; there appears to be an updated edition, which you can find here.