Sterling A. Brown’s sonnet “Challenge” begins as a love poem full of magnificent boasts and ends as a rueful question. The speaker remembers telling his beloved, in the “drunken pride of youth and you,” that Time could never play its tricks on them, that even Death—capitalized as a violent “Highwayman”—could not silence his praise. Looking back, he does not simply dismiss that younger self. The poem’s central concern is how honestly love can make the impossible feel certain, and how maturity turns that certainty into tender self-mockery.
Brown, an African American poet and scholar known especially for blues-inflected poetry, works here in a more formal sonnet register. The fourteen lines of mostly iambic pentameter give the poem the shape of a love sonnet, and its rhymes stay close enough to sonnet patterns to feel controlled while slant sounds keep the voice from becoming stiff. The octave quotes the old boast; the sestet reflects on it. In the first eight lines the speaker twice announces “I said,” as though listening to his younger voice. Time appears as “mischief-making” and playing “ill-humoured tricks”; Death becomes a “Highwayman” whose “clutch” throttles breath. These are grand, theatrical figures. The speaker claims that even after that clutch, his “hymns” would “float in praise, undauntedly.” The long adverb “undauntedly” is faintly strained, as if the courage has to push itself into the line.
The turn comes with the ninth line: “I did not think such words were bravado.” The word “bravado” does crucial work. It admits what the opening boasts sounded like while also insisting they were sincere. “Oh, I think honestly we knew no fear, / Of Time or Death,” the speaker says; the pause after “fear” and the enjambment into “Of Time or Death” make the confidence waver. By the closing lines the grand claim has become a memory of performance: “with you believing me, I made / My prophecies, rebellious, unafraid....” The word “prophecies” carries religious and poetic authority, but the verb “made” quietly undercuts it, as though prophecies can be manufactured. Then the poem collapses its own prophetic strain into one plain word: “foolish.”
The final question, “And that was foolish, wasn’t it, my dear?”, is not a bitter retraction. Its “my dear” is intimate and present; the rhyme of “fear” and “dear” makes tenderness the last note, while the casual rhythm of “wasn’t it” breaks the formality of the earlier lines. What makes the poem significant is its refusal to sustain a conventional sonnet promise. Instead of claiming that love or verse can defeat Time and Death, Brown lets the speaker admit that the challenge was human, youthful, and doomed—and yet the affection that motivated it remains. The challenge in the title turns out to be not only against Death but against the speaker’s own earlier self.