The poem, published in 1950, sweeps through the life of Annie Allen, an ordinary black girl who dreams of finding happiness and attaining self-consciousness in 43 stanzas.
Left to folly or to fate, / Whom the higher gods forgot, / Whom the lower gods berate / Physical and underfed / Fancying on the featherbed / What was never and is not “Think of sweet and chocolate,” she writes:
The opening lines of Gwendolyn Brooks’s epic “The Anniad” are, like the rest of the poem, deceptively uncomplicated.
