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Phenomenal woman maya angelou poem analysis
Maya angelou alone poem analysis
Phenomenal woman maya angelou poem analysis
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"Alone" by Maya Angelou explains how happiness can not be achieved if you don't have anyone to enjoy it with. She shows that not matter who you are or what you do, no one "can make it out here alone" (10). The poem is spoken by what is most likely a woman who is pondering her loneliness and unhappiness. She is not speaking directly to a specific person or group of people, but to humans as a whole. This poem describes to the reader how if they do not have friends, family, and their community to be there to help them in troubles, then they will be unhappy. Maya Angelou uses repetition, figurative language, and includes different examples of different people to convey and illustrate how a person needs someone.
In this poem, repetition is continuously used throughout. One of the main characteristics that a reader will recognize about this poem, is that it contains large amounts of repetition with words and phrases. Throughout the poem, Angelou repeats the words "alone" and "nobody" numerous times. In fact, there is a three line stanza that repeats "alone" three times and "nobody" twice (11-13). This stanza is then repeated, word for word, two more times throughout the poem (23-25, 35-37). Angelou does this to emphasize her message for the poem. If someone reads something once, they may not realize how significant it really is. By repeating those two words and that phrase multiple times, Angelou showed the reader just how important it is to find somebody that cares about you so you don't have to be alone and unhappy.
Angelou uses multiple different kinds of figurative language to enhance the message of the story. The first figurative language she used was personification. She said, "Where water is not thirsty," giving water the hum...
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...from loneliness more and more. She says, "Storm clouds are gathering / The wind is gonna blow / The race of man is suffering / And I cam hear the moan" (28-31). These four lines are Angelou's way of telling the reader that she sees more and more people suffering and it is affecting humans of all races. The reason Angelou included these different examples was to emphasize that loneliness is everywhere and can happen to anyone.
Maya Angelou did a fantastic job of emphasizing her message and making it clear for the reader to understand. Through repetition, figurative language, and providing examples of how different people are lonely, Angelou signified how important it is for a person to find someone that cared about them. Just packed into thirty-seven short lines, Angelou conveyed a message that can impact any reader that takes the time to read this meaningful poem.
Lonely” is a poem about a kid having trouble living his life and he isolates himself from other people which makes his life harder. In this poem the author uses symbolism, a metaphor, and rhetorical questions to show how being isolated can make life more difficult. The author tells the audience that whenever anyone tries to isolates themselves there life gets harder for them.
For me, “Alone” was easy to connect with. I was able to connect with the poem in various ways. The theme of the poem played a large role in my connection to the poem. For example, Poe mentions how he knew he was different from his peers at a young age. I was able to connect with the poem at this section because, from my parent's divorce to my sister living with my grandparents, I knew my life was different than those around me. I was also able to connect to the poem because when I faced depression from eighth to tenth grade, I had a pessimistic view on life; similar to Poe's last two lines in “Alone”. Due to these reasons, it was easy for me to connect to Edgar Allan Poe's poem “Alone”.
Since the character is illiterate, he has no ability to determine his true feelings for the loved one. Additionally, this use of repetitive words in the poem also shows the lack of diction by the character. When words are repeated, it typically tells someone that they are either confused or have a weak vocabulary. Since it is implied that the man had a small lexicon because of his illiteracy, the poem reveals his ideas in a simplistic and repetitive wording
She did not complain about her childhood, racism, divorce, losing her friends, or rejection. She has overcome all the obstacles with courage; that is another lesson we can learn. In her poem, she says, “You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I’ll rise!” Angelou knew who she was. She learned not to live according to people’s opinions.
The poem's speaker mistreated,gloomy and being isolated. She is a person who loss and assimilation if not loose your self. “That this
Angelou wants to bring these people, these hearts and souls together in love to make King’s dreams a reality in this lifetime. After Angelou builds emotion by listing the ideals that King fought for, she delivers her climax:“This is what I want to see and I want to see it through my eyes and through your eyes, Coretta Scott King.” By repeating “through my eyes… through your eyes,” Maya Angelou shows the tie between herself and King-- their fight is one and the same. Her solidarity with King encourages others to stand by Coretta Scott King’s dream, even though she has passed on. Angelou finishes her eulogy just as she started it, singing, “I open my mouth to the Lord and I won’t turn back, no. I will go, I shall go. I’ll see what the end is gonna be.” The second time the verse is repeated, it takes on a different meaning. At the beginning, sung solemnly, the words suggest a soul going faithfully into the afterlife. After Angelou’s passionate cry for peace and justice in the world, the words are closer to a battlecry-- Angelou will finish what King could
The Book of Common Prayer offers an intercession for “our families, friends and neighbors, and for those who are alone.” We tend to put the alone in this separate category, but for Olivia Laing, “the essential unknowability of others” means that to be human is to be lonesome, at least sometimes. So why don’t we talk about it more openly? “What’s so shameful,” she asks, about “having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness?” This daring and seductive book — ostensibly about four artists, but actually about the universal struggle to be known — raises sophisticated questions about the experience of loneliness, a state that in a crowded city provides an “uneasy combination of separation and exposure.”
Ms. Angelou's rhetorical strategy of comparison and contrast serves as effectively as her brilliant, flowing sentences sprinkled with colorful simile and imagery. Poetic phrases describing a voice "like a river diminishing to a stream, and then a trickle" or the audience's conditioned responses as "Amen's and Yes, sir's began to fall around the room like rain through a ragged umbrella" paint vivid images.
The first stanza describes the depth of despair that the speaker is feeling, without further explanation on its causes. The short length of the lines add a sense of incompleteness and hesitance the speaker feels towards his/ her emotions. This is successful in sparking the interest of the readers, as it makes the readers wonder about the events that lead to these emotions. The second and third stanza describe the agony the speaker is in, and the long lines work to add a sense of longing and the outpouring emotion the speaker is struggling with. The last stanza, again structured with short lines, finally reveals the speaker 's innermost desire to "make love" to the person the speaker is in love
Stephen Marche Lets us know that loneliness is “not a state of being alone”, which he describes as external conditions rather than a psychological state. He states that “Solitude can be lovely. Crowded parties can be agony.”
Through the lonely speaker, a detached tone is expressed with the use of selective diction, deep symbolism, and reflective allusion working together to form the meaning of the poem that hardships bring us to detachment from life because it causes us to feel isolated from others.
The third stanza is a second and different refrain. This refrain occurs in every other stanza. It acts as a divider between the stanzas dealing with a specific character. In the fourth stanza, Father McKenzie is introduced to the reader. He is described as a materialistic man whose life has no meaning.
Given these points, Angelou’s widely use of devices, sentence length, and tenses allows the reader to capture the theme of her poem Men. Angelou shows how women are somewhat treated then and now. She lets the reader know that even after a man may have hurt a woman, a woman still would have a desire to go back to them because we are curious to know of them. She presents the idea that women are oppressed to men – women like Angelou who have had bad experiences with them. Overall, Angelou’s poem is like a story that presents men as head honcho over women and the affect that they bring upon
The Wife?s Lament speaks movingly about loneliness, due to the speaker projecting the lonesomeness of the women who was exiled from society. The woman in the poem has been exiled from her husband and everything she loves, all she has is a single oak-tree to be comforted by. As she has been banished from all she loves, the tone becomes gloomy and depressing. The speaker uses expressions such as joyless and dark to create a sorrowful mood for the poem. As well as the expressions used in this poem, the setting also creates loneliness. The setting generates a darkened and desolate place which makes the woman feel exiled from society.
Maya Angelou’s word choice in “Phenomenal Woman” is simple and dull, but it fits the poem perfectly once it is read. The words used in the poem are not powerful but it keeps you reading. It makes the readers a have different opinion on the poem. Also it makes the readers analyze what she is really trying to say. For example, in the poem Maya Angelou states “Men themselves have wondered, What they see in me. They try so much, But they can’t touch, My inner mystery.” It is a little confusing on what she is trying to say because of her word choice and the way the sentences are connected, but reading furthermore into the stanza, it begins to become more understanding. Then too, If she had used a different word choice the poem would not have been so intriguing. For example, if she would have said “Men don’t really understand my personality”, instead of “Men themselves have wondered, What they see in me.” then the readers would not have to put much attention into it and the theme would be completely different. Moreover, another example would be “ It’s the fire in my eyes, And the flash of my teeth, The swing in my waist, And the joy in my feet. I’m a woman Phenomenally’’. She uses simple phrases like “fire in my eyes”, “flash of my teeth”, “swing in my waist”, etc. to show the phenomenal woman she is. The word choice that Maya Angelou portrays in this poem, makes woman realize that