Maya angelou quotes about death2/21/2024 Playing on the name of her home country, Angelou invites us to reflect on the divisive nature of the ‘United’ States of America – a country in which racial and socio-economic divisions loom large.Īngelou refers to some of the great ‘achievements’ of America, from the Telstar satellite to the atomic bomb. The references to food being gone and rent being due suggest that life is a constant struggle for the Black Americans depicted in the poem, which takes its title from a prominent African-American district in New York. Here’s another poem in which racial inequality is tied to freedom, although poverty is another salient theme of the poem. The speaker is such a woman, who nevertheless finds something to call her ‘own’ when she looks to the sun, the rain, the oceans, and the mountains: nature’s bounty. This poem is perhaps the best example of this theme in Angelou’s poetry. Another important strand to her work is work itself: a focus on the daily menial tasks which many wives and mothers have to carry out around the home as part of their domestic duties. Many of Maya Angelou’s best-known poems focus on the plight of women, and specifically Black women. Yet Angelou tells us that the girl in the poem is ‘blameless’, inviting us to read the poem as about ‘mothers’ and ‘daughters’ in a wider sense: it is about the generational shift between African-American women of Angelou’s mother’s age, and those of Angelou’s own generation. The subject of the poem is a girl who goes home to her mother’s arms, afraid and ‘creeping’ because she fears she is in trouble.
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