The Lesson

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1978

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Speaker

The poem is told ostensibly in the first person, that is, limited to convey the experiences and the perception of the poet or a persona, a character created within the context of the poem. In this case, drawing on the considerable tragedies, agonies, and indignities of her own life-narrative, Angelou testifies to her own triumphant survival.

Angelou, however, provides her speaker with no context, personal or otherwise. There is no setting, no specific conflict, no action, no other characters that might give the speaker an identity. There is something larger going on. In this, Angelou uses the first-person “I” (Lines 1, 12, 13) to create immediacy and urgency to a poem that, in turn, speaks for a broad reach of humanity, a choral I that crosses ethnic, religious, economic, and sociopolitical boundaries. In this, Angelou uses what could be called the first-person collective or the first-person plural. Recalling the narrative voice of the Old Testament Psalms or the soaring transcendental “I” who declaims in Walt Whitman’s spiritual poetry or the heroic voice heard in narratives of the enslaved and in gospel lyrics, Angelou’s “I” speaks for all those who endure pain and who are tested by suffering and who, in the end, affirm the grandness of living. The “I” implies a “we.”

Form and Meter

“The Lesson” is told in a reader-friendly open verse, 13 lines of unfixed length. It is not free verse, which suggests the poet striving for the effect of spontaneity and the careless flow of consciousness. Rather, in open verse, the poet maintains careful control of the lines by manipulating the play of vowels and consonants. In this, each line is more like a line of music, aurally different, the words themselves sustaining a subtle interplay of shifting rhythms. Their very sounds create the poem’s meter, a metrical device she heard early on in the verse lines of Edgar Allan Poe, poems that she memorized during her long period of isolation and elective mutism. Angelou herself was trained as a torch singer, known for her theatrical and exaggerated delivery of songs.

Take, for instance, the dramatic tipping point in the poem, when the speaker confronts the irrefutable evidence of the trauma of their life by looking at the lines on their face: “The years / And cold defeat live deep in / Lines along my face” (Lines 8-10). It seems like unforced conversational open verse. But formlessness is only apparent. The depth of the pain in the speaker’s epiphany is conveyed by the drawn-out lines themselves. Angelou manipulates a series of long vowels (o’s, e’s, i’s) against the slow sibilant f’s and l’s and those long soft s’s. The recitation cannot rush the lines. The juxtaposition of vowels and consonants compels that attention be paid to this moment. There is even a kind of natural pause after the word “defeat” that mimics the deep breath the speaker takes before acknowledging the testimony of the lines cut into her face. Hence the poem itself uses the words themselves to create both form and meter.

Enjambment

In a poem that celebrates the challenge of living through all of the agonies or tragedies along the way, the poem itself reflects the poet’s struggle to accept those agonies and still affirm the joy of life. Life is this, the poet argues darkly, and yet it is this. The movement back and forth that culminates in the closing epiphany is reflected in the poem’s construction, specifically Angelou’s use of enjambment.

Enjambment refers to how a poet manipulates end-line punctuation such as commas, periods, and semi-colons, to create flow in the recitation of the poem and to control the poem’s rhythm and pace. Only six of the poem’s 13 lines move toward some end-punctuation. The poem itself then is restless, animated, pulsing, always moving forward.

First, Angelou’s use of enjambment creates a reading experience that allows for the poem to sound conversational rather than poetical, avoiding the predictable singsong rhythm patterns typical of poems with frequent end-line stops. More important, however, enjambment allows lines to pour one into the next in urgent movement, underscoring the poem’s celebration of being alive and its courageous defiance of the many deaths of emotional traumas. Nothing can stop the speaker; nothing can stop the poem.