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How Does Maya Angelou Provoke The Audience To Feel The Sense Of Equality?

Decent Essays

How does Maya Angelou provoke the audience to feel the sense of equality? Maya Angelou captures the audience’s attention through her persuasive piece ‘Still I Rise’ which evidently addresses her implicit response to oppression and mistreatment, African- American women suffered for decades. This poem focuses on the conformity of Angelou to the oppressors on the behalf of all the black women and the loss of their self-respect and dignity in the process. Language techniques Various poetic devices were used in the poem to enhance the symbolism and intensity of the poem. Maya Angelou incorporates metaphor as she compares herself to ‘black ocean, leaping and wide’, which reinforces her struggles of going through a rough time, indicating that she felt unrestrained like the ocean but was capable of overcoming her difficulties comparing them to an image of a stormy and vast ocean. The poem features constant repetition of ‘still I rise’ that powerfully emphasizes on the …show more content…

Maya Angelou’s tone is overall assertive throughout the whole poem but it tends to become more powerful and stronger in the 6th stanza, creating a sense of empowerment, as she accuses her oppressors’ mistreatments and fights back by saying ‘But still, like air, I'll rise’. Sarcasm is clearly evident in the stanzas where Angelou incorporates rhetorical questions to accuse the people who humiliated and mistreated her and her self – confidence also reflects as she says ‘Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines, diggin' in my own back yard’. Her confidence portrays her as a strong person, as even though she suffered through a harsh world she still managed to laugh like she has ‘gold mines’. The tone was calm by the end of the poem which allowed Angelou to highlight the final conclusion to the audience much more

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