Hatred
Gwendolyn Bennett has written an entire collection of poems, but many of them accompany a similar theme - hatred. One of her poems even going so far as to be titled Hatred, not all of her works discuss the topic in a necessarily bad way. For example, when writing her collection of poems in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, she doesn't exactly discuss hatred, but implies that the emotion was needed to get things done in the right way. She has unclear expressed views on hatred, seen through her ever-changing poetry, but in her poem with the same title, she even mentions, "Hating you shall be a game".
Change Over Time
Being best known for her work in Opportunity, Bennett for sure shows the theme of change over time in her work. Expressing how important change for the better can be, she illustrates through words what would have happened if there had been no change. In this poem particularly, she commonly uses words like "want" or "will", showing that when she has the desire to do something, she will do it, changing things, for the most part, for the better.
Love
Taking a common theme in many works of literature, Bennett expresses her love in a very different sort of way. Not many of her poems have to do with loving another poem as is typical, but instead the love to work to make things better is expressed. Although the themes of hatred and love may seem completely different from each other, as they are, Bennett has showed us that the two can have very similar effects when used properly. Loving your work, it seems, isn't too hard to do after all.
