Brian Anyika Jr.
Dr. Bliman
Reading response 4
February 7, 2024
Reading Response 4
The poem A song in the front yard talks about the protagonist being this little girl who is
in the front yard but wants to see what goes on in the back. She goes on to tell us how much fun
the back yard people have and how her mother doesn’t agree with her. On a deeper level this
poem seems to be about classism. The front yard people see to be of higher class, while backyard
people seem to be of lower class, and when the girl tells her mother that she wants to go in the
backyard; her mother informs her that she will grow up to be a bad woman.
The speaker's life much like the “front yard” is kept well, in the fourth line of the first
stanza the poet writes “A girl gets sick of a rose” she is bored with her life, she has a curfew and
follows all the rules. In contrast the backyard people are unkempt, she refers to the children that
she wants to play with as “charity children.” She knows that she is different but she wants to be
like the backyard people because they are more fun, however the older generation would
consider them to be trash. This can be seen in today’s society as well, when middle and upper
class children get a hold of and mimic the behaviors of children who are impoverished because it
simply looks “cool” and a lot of the times celebrities would make a profit of these “trashy”
behaviors, such as Kim Kardashian and Dolly Parton.