Loathe Largesse

Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “The Lovers of the Poor” describes a group of ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League who, one day, go down to the slums to aid its inhabitants. These ladies live in comfortable homes with “hostess gowns and sunburst clocks,” and so they find the slums quite shocking. “It’s all so bad! And entirely too much for them.” Throughout their day spent helping the poor, the ladies are aware that they could have been the ones who need aid. They could have been born into these circumstances. They could have been the poor. No matter how far you place yourself from poverty, when you’re amidst its throes, it feels as if anytime you could fall into it. The ladies are so relieved that they do not have to deal with “old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they’re told, something called chitterlings” every day, but they are also horrified that they could have been or could be. "Loathe largesse" is the feeling you get when you volunteer your time to help the poor. You are doing a good thing by helping the poor, which is the “largesse” part, but the whole time you’re helping them clean their house or take care of their children, you hate them for what they remind you. You could have been the poor. In the future, you could be the poor. You are only a few rungs above them on the ladder of wealth. What should happen if you lose your footing? This is the “loathe” in loathe largesse. The ladies of the Ladies’ Betterment League are performing an act of largesse when they visit the slums and help those who live there, but during their whole outing, they loathe the poor for reminding them of what they could be. When the ladies finally leave the slums, they “allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,” so they won’t take any dirt with them and “resume all the clues of what they were” before they came to the slums, “trying to avoid inhaling the laden air.”