American music is represented here as well. Look at the third stanza, where she speaks of polished, pristine, perfect, and purpose, then shifts to, “… compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.” It was a message the political leaders gathered together that day could not fail to notice.Īmanda Gorman is also a master of alliteration, that wordplay when sounds repeat themselves in a sentence or a few phrases.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” She plays with words when she writes, “… what just is isn’t always justice.” And she references the Preamble to the US Constitution when she writes, “… that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.” The founding fathers of our country understood that the country would always be a work-in-progress, and stated so by beginning the Constitution with these words: But it also means to be trapped in any hopeless situation.
A drowning Jonah prays to God to save him, only to have a giant whale swallow him whole, trapping him in the belly of the beast. You may know that the phrase alludes to the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale.
Take, for example, her reference in the first stanza to the belly of the beast. It is only the first of many ingenious literary devices at work in this piece. The US Congress is known as Capitol Hill, so the hill in her poem is simultaneously a literal and physical manifestation. She said that was when the inspiration for the poem fully formed in her mind. Gorman was writing her poem for the 2021 inauguration when an insurrectionist mob broke into the US Capitol building just two weeks before the ceremony. The Hill We Climb is filled with rich imagery and figurative allusions from culture, history, and the Bible. If you are studying the English language, you could not find a better example of its power than Amanda Gorman’s poem performed at the inauguration ceremony for President Joe Biden.
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