![]() Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Stream Classic Poetry Readings from Harvard’s Rich Audio Archive: From W.H. 'Still I Rise' begins with, '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.' Throughout the poem. Hear Sylvia Plath Read 50+ of Her Dark, Compelling Poems ![]() Hear Dylan Thomas Recite His Classic Poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, Venmo and Crypto. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. ![]() If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. You may have the grace to look up and outīoth poems will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. She ends the poem where she begins her reading of “Still I Rise” above, with a call for us to treat each other with care and respect, to not be “wedded forever / To fear, yoked eternally / To brutishness”: Her celebration of not only the particular African-American struggle, but also its part in the universal human struggle for dignity and purpose stands as her enduring legacy. Again she twines themes of transcending painful and bloody histories with those of the “nobleness of the human spirit.” The speaker of the poem is the earth itself, who addresses each of us as “a bordered country / Delicate and strangely made proud.” “History,” she writes in much-quoted lines from the poem’s ninth stanza, “despite its wrenching pain / Cannot be unlived, but if faced / With courage, need not be lived again.” For all the pain Angelou herself endured and faced with courage, it’s a sentiment she earned the right to proclaim. While the caged bird is a very personal symbol for Angelou, her poem “ On the Pulse of the Morning,” which you can see her read above at Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration, speaks to the whole human species in elemental terms. That resilience, the transcendence of painful personal and ancestral histories, was the great theme of Angelou’s work, whether in poems like “Still I Rise” or her revealing 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, also the title of a poem from her 1983 collection Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?.
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