I will be doing my poetry explication on “Still I Rise“ by Maya Angelou. Still I rise was published in the year of 1978. This is a poem that is often described as powerful, and empowering. It talks about the difficulties on overcoming prejudice and injustice. This is one of Maya angelou’s most popular poems. When people read this poem becomes hope for those who feel hopeless. It is a reminder of the constant abuse on power by those who sit in the government, military and police force.
To the public it sends a clear message to keep hope and do not let it go no matter what. The poem still I rise has a mixture of tones. It sounds Playful but at the same time I sounds as if the authors tone is showing resistance and angry. Over all the poems tone as the title suggests she is proud. The poems first word “you” are very important. It lets us know to whom this poem is addressed for. It is addressed to others.
This poem is not private it is addressed to white oppressors of colored people. The poem shows us a colored woman willing to not only speak up for herself but also for other colored people and even her ancestors. This poem is very political but also personal. The author is specifically responding to decades even centuries of mistreatment and abuse. Even then her tone was not arrogant. Instead she makes the readers feel a lot of sympathy with her rejection towards the constant abuse.
127 our experts are availableright now
This poems first line has a great deal of significance. The first kind of oppression the author mentions is rooted in writing.”You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lies”( Angelou page 885). The poem does not begin by emphasizing physical dominance or literal violence. Instead, it begins by emphasizing the ways the wrong kinds of writing can imprison the minds of both oppressors and the oppressed. In this case the oppressors would be the whites and oppressed the colored people.
In line 3 there is the first inference to actual physical oppression. “You may trod me in the very dirt” ( angelou page 885). the phrasing here seems more metaphor than literal. Metaphorically speaking to tread another person into the dirt is to treat that person with a lot of disrespect and violence. Yet no sooner does the speaker imagine being abused in this way than she immediately responds, “But still, like dust, I’ll rise” (anguelou page 885). The reference to “dust” is effective. It infers that something normally seen as negative can instead be seen as positive.
It implies that something normally seen as merely bothersome can actually possess a kind of resilience and strength.the speaker injects plenty of sarcastic humor into the work, beginning in stanza 2, especially with the extravagantly playful references to “oil wells” in her “living room” (7-8. The speaker’s cleverness shows that her own mind is free, just as she seeks to free the minds of other blacks, partly through her own “sassiness” (5). The poem is full of witty taunting. It cleverly degrades those who have earlier degraded blacks. In lines 9-10, the speaker implies that her rising is natural, inevitable, irresistible, unstoppable. Nothing the oppressors can do can now prevent her and her people from rising. Like the rise of suns and moons, their freedom will bring a kind of light into darkness.
The days of sadness for blacks have now passed (13-16), not because they are suddenly and improbably immune from sadness but because they refuse to give their oppressors the satisfaction of seeing them sad. The speaker’s tone now becomes almost condescending and pitying: “Don’t you take it awful hard” (18). The sympathy here is mock sympathy. It is as if the speaker intends to let her oppressors know how it feels to be treated with the supercilious disdain she and her people have felt.
The tables are now turned: the speaker looks down on her oppressors rather than the other way around that is clearly under the speaker’s sometimes angry, sometimes playful control. Thus she echoes “sassiness” (5) in “sexiness” (25), uses alliteration with good humor throughout the work (as in “dance like I’ve got diamonds” [27]), and is even playfully erotic (as in the reference to the “meeting of [her] thighs” [28]). This is a speaker who at least makes it appear (despite the pain that she has clearly felt) that she cannot have her resilience and optimism suppressed or destroyed.
Yet her good spirits are not rooted simply in personal self-confidence. Rather, and especially near the end of the poem, she pays open tribute to her ancestors, who experienced much worse oppression than she has suffered (29-32, 39-40). The poem ultimately becomes an implied accolade or homage to their courage and to their inspiring example. Thus, although the word I is mentioned frequently throughout this poem, and although it is especially strongly stressed as the poem concludes, in the final analysis, this poem is not a work dealing with the ego of the speaker but with the heritage of her ancestors and also with the prospects of the contemporaries for whom she speaks.
