18 pages • 36 minutes read
Maya AngelouThe Lesson
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
“The Small Fists of Sleeping Children”
The vivid image of the opening and closing of “the / Small fists of sleeping / Children” (Lines 2-4) symbolizes the deep-seated passion to live that Angelou celebrates in every person. Children do not think about the movement. After all, the children are asleep. Yet something in the baby animates those fists. For the poet, that something symbolizes the determination to live despite the indignities, the disappointments, and the sufferings of life. It is hard-wired into the human spirit. Survival is intuitive.
There is something in the human spirit that will not, cannot surrender. The death that the poet decries, that is, the routine indignities and sorrows, is, in the end, nothing the human will cannot stand against. The image of a sleeping child suggests that these emotional traumas, these so-called deaths, are not as large or threatening as they may seem. In fact, the symbol suggests these terrors of life are little more than the hobgoblins of bad dreams. They are not real. The child sleeps. The child is not dead. The will to fight is further suggested as the sleeping children clench their tiny fists, a traditional symbol of the determination to fight back, to resist. The children then symbolize hope. The sleeping children, with fists clenched, anticipate the always-coming dawn and the happy rising to the challenge of a new day.
The Worms
It is a Gothic, even nightmarish image: worms eating flesh post-mortem. With this symbol, the speaker confronts the ultimate anxiety, the fear of death. The speaker, like everyone else, grows up through the experience of watching others—family members, friends—surrender to death. Those memories haunt the speaker, what is termed the “memory of old tombs” (Line 5). The speaker refuses to pretty up death. The speaker does not find happy refuge in pleasant images of some mythical reunion in a heavenly afterlife. Rather, the speaker considers the hard reality of physical decomposition, worms consuming dead flesh.
Worms eating flesh then symbolize the fear of death that cannot be withstood, challenged, or defeated. Unlike the routine indignities and sorrows of everyday life that can be fought and even overcome, death is always there, always a reality. The worms constantly, unerringly, methodically remind us every day that we are flesh and that flesh is corruptible and ultimately disposable. It is a striking qualification of Angelou’s Christian gospel that regards death itself as a portal and stresses the radiant life of the soul, thus denying importance to the gross physical form. The poem refuses to console by denying death. Rather, the poem uses the worms to symbolize awareness of mortality, to remind the reader vividly of death’s reality. That makes the leap to joy to which the poem now moves that much more heroic.
The Lines on the Face
Before the speaker asserts the privilege of suffering and the deep reward of surviving life’s challenges, one after the other, the speaker contemplates the lines on their face and how in those creases life has left its mark. The lines the speaker notes that cut into their face, however, symbolize not the ravages of time but rather the speaker’s earned optimism. They have endured much. There is no denying the impact of the speaker’s years. Although some may seek to minimize, even alleviate such tell-tale signs of aging, the speaker embraces the lines on their face, contemplates them, and refuses to stare away from them.
The lines give quiet, irrefutable witness to a life lived, a difficult life that has tested but did not destroy the speaker’s optimism, that dampened but did not bankrupt the energy of hope. Yes, the speaker acknowledges, looking at the lines certainly causes pain. The speaker admits that the sight of the lines causes their eyes to dull, that is, to nearly cease to look. But the speaker will not turn away. Now these deep lines give the speaker’s own resilient hope its authenticity and gravitas. These lines then symbolize the lesson to celebrate the joy of life because of, not despite, suffering.
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By Maya Angelou
