Throughout this analytical essay
Throughout this analytical essay, I will be comparing two poems from the poet Maya Angelou. In the poem Still I rise, the speaker communicates confidently that she will always rise up and that she is not scared anymore. Maya Angelou deals with injustice by intimidating the offender and encouraging the victims using interrogative sentences. In the poem Caged birds, the author demonstrates injustice by describing two birds, one caged and one freed. The poet uses contrast to evoke feelings of liberty and captivity.
In both poems the author delivers a clear message and communicates her emotions using different sentence structure. In the poem Still I rise, the author delivers confidently that she will rise up whatever the situation and that she is not scared while in the poem Caged birds the author communicated a feeling of liberty and captivity. In the poem Still I rise, the poet uses interrogative sentences such as “Did you want to see me broken?” to intimidate the oppressor and show him she is not scared. This makes the speaker seem very confident as she addresses to the oppressor directly and try intimidating him. The fact that she uses questions throughout the poem is very effective because it creates persistence and insistence and it shows that the speaker is determinate to solve this issue. This technique is very effective because it creates a direct link between the poet and the audience and it makes the reader think that the poet is speaking directly to them. In the poem Caged birds the author uses verses such as “the cage bird stands on the grave of dreams” to communicate a feeling of captivity and restriction and “a free bird leaps on the back of the wind” to evoke a feeling of freedom. The main themes of Caged birds are freedom and captivity which are antonyms. The distinction between the two themes allows Maya Angelou to express her own emotions about captivity and liberty and makes the poem more powerful. She uses these two themes to show that freedom is a wonderful privilege and that captivity is horrific and unfair. Furthermore, she uses words such as rage and nightmare when referring to the caged birds and uses words like dream and breeze when talking about the freed bird. This technique is very efficient because it makes us think of the two perspective and highlights that freedom is incredible and captivity terrible. Both poems can be relevant for us today since they are very encouraging, motivating and inspiring. It is also significant because they give us ideas of how to deal with injustice.
Each of the poems takes a slightly different approach of discrimination and racism. In the poem Still I rise the poet is writing about how she has overcome discrimination and is encouraging other people to do so. Cage birds describes how black people are trapped like birds in a cage because of their skin tone. In the poem Still I rise, Maya Angelou sounds confident and the tone of the poem is encouraging and inspiring. The poem Still I rise is filled with figurative language such as metaphors “Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines” which both seems and sounds like an encouraging hymn to the colored people suffering. In this poem the poet is telling the audience how she overcame the obstacles
