More than two decades before Brooks began to experiment with open verse that captured the ragged syncopated music of the street world of her South Side Chicago, here Brooks uses a traditional poetic meter, inherited from white European models, to create her heroic portrait of a young Black girl coming into awareness. Like Phillis Wheatley, an African-born slave in pre-Revolutionary War Boston who found in elegant transcriptions of her life into European poetic models a defiant expression of her own fused identity, her roots in Africa, her reality in white Massachusetts, Brooks uses a variation of the alexandrine line—six units of stressed and unstressed syllables per line, for a total of 12 syllables—to infuse the picture of a Black child growing up impoverished with elegance and dignity.

The alexandrine line, a demanding and virtuoso meter because it requires the sonic manipulation of a relatively long line, must be both disciplined and sinewy or the recitation becomes clumsy and prosaic. Because the six-unit line lends itself to conversation tone and because the second beat in each unit can be stressed or un-stressed, the poem invites recitation that can work with breaks and allow dramatic lingering.