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About

Genius Annotation

From Angelou’s collection And Still I Rise (1978).

This poem is a response to society’s attitudes from black women. As Zora Neale Hurston another, black author, said in Their Eyes Were Watching God black women are “de mule uh de world,” or “the mule of the world”. No matter how badly abused and disrespected black women like Hurston and Angelou and others are, they still rise up and resist oppression. It is an assertive statement of resilience and confidence.

Structure
The poem comprises quatrains, that is four-lined stanzas, but after the seventh the regularity of the structure is abandoned. The eighth and ninth stanzas comprise six and nine lines respectively, indicting the poet’s freedom from constraints. The repetition of ‘I rise’ is also a statement of liberation. The ABCB rhyming system is abandoned, so that stanza eight forms an ABABCC rhyming pattern, and stanza nine ABABCCBBB. She also abandons the regular metrical rhythm in the last two stanzas. The poet is free to do as she wishes.

Language and Imagery
The poet begins in the first person singular ‘I’, addressing the reader or a listener as ‘you’. The tone is assertive and challenging, the colloquial language interspersed with lyrical snatches. So, for example, the poet refers to ‘diggin’ in my own back yard', but then also writes;

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

It is this boldness and flexibility that gives the poem its power.

The poem, in its defiance and assertion of power, can be compared to the words of a Peggy Lee song, ‘I’m a Woman’. Although Lee is white and confines her statement of strength to a woman’s sphere — that of home, sex and motherhood — she challenges the traditional source of power; white men. She is not the frail, submissive little woman fitting male expectations. She also inserts a neat, veiled insult at the end (‘I can make a dress out of a feed-bag and I can make a man out of you’!) In its time her attitude was revolutionary, as is Angelou’s.

Q&A

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

What does it mean that I dance like I've got diamonds at the meeting of my thigh
Genius Answer

For lack of a better phrase, she dances like her coochie’s popping. She’s just got that kind of confidence in herself

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