Poem for October: 'Still I Rise' by Maya Angelou

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

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.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Maya Angelou, 1978

Maya Angelou was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She spent 

her childhood in the 1930s with her grandmother in Stamps, a segregated town in Arkansas. 

In chapter I of her autobiography Why the caged birds sing she refers to Shakespeare as 

her favourite author and quotes a line from sonnet 29 which reflects her experience as 

a black child in that town.

 ‘ During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love. Although I enjoyed and respected Kipling, Poe, Butler, Thackeray and Henley, I saved my young and loyal passion for Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois ‘Litany at Atlanta.’ But it was Shakespeare who said, ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men´s eyes.’ It was a state with which I felt myself most familiar. I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he had been dead so long it couldn´t matter to anyone any more.’

From Why the caged birds sing, 1969, chapter1

Sonnet 29

When in disgrace with fortune and men´s eyes

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possess´d,

Desiring this man´s art, and that man´s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, - and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven´s gate;

For thy sweet love remember´d such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.