A Summary and Analysis of Amanda Gorman’s ‘We Rise’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘We Rise’ is an inspiring piece celebrating female empowerment and solidarity which calls upon women to support each other to bring about social change. The poem also cleverly summons the work of earlier poets who had written on the same topic.

Summary

Gorman begins the poem by reminding her female audience that the whole world is watching them as they ‘rise’. ‘Rise’ here means predominantly ‘progresses’ or ‘gains power and strength and success’, though it’s worth pondering whether there isn’t a faint suggestion of rising up, or pushing for change through protest and political activism.

Women, Gorman continues, are ‘paving the way’ for change. Women should help to raise each other up, showing the world that women are not victims but victors: successful, triumphant, strong. They have broken their silence and are now speaking up.

Being a woman is also about raising awareness of the ‘most vulnerable’ among them: those women who live without freedom. Those who are speaking out against their oppression should be supported so that other women magnify the voices of these brave women. Although there is much at stake, it has always been true that it requires great courage to make a real difference in the world.

Through such female solidarity, women can individually overcome their fears about speaking out, and work together to change communities and even whole countries for the generations to come.

Gorman then calls for world leaders who are able to think beyond the present moment and see where society needs to go, rather than where it currently is. Women who stand up for what they believe can lead the way here, and bring about genuine change. All it takes is one woman to stand up and start a movement, and if others support her, all women will benefit from the progress that is brought about as a result. The important thing is that women empower each other, acting together.

Analysis

Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘We Rise’ is a powerful and uplifting piece celebrating female empowerment and solidarity. Gorman read the poem at Variety’s Power of Women event presented by Lifetime. At the event, the poet encouraged the women in the audience to rise up and speak their truth to power.

Women rising together is the key focus of the poem. Gorman is keen to depict women’s strength: they are victors, rather than victims. They are powerful, but they need to work together to bring about change in the world. Knowing what the future can bring – in a memorable image, she describes this as not knowing the wind, but knowing where it will blow – is key to women’s success in gaining greater justice and equality around the world.

Cleverly, Gorman’s poem calls up several other poets (also Black American writers, for whom speaking up required double the courage as both women and black women at a time of racial discrimination and prejudice) whose work she is responding to and developing. The title of her poem, ‘We Rise’, most famously summons ‘Still I Rise’, probably Maya Angelou’s most celebrated and widely known poem. The focus has shifted from Angelou’s individual ‘I rise’ to the collective ‘We Rise’ of Gorman’s poem.

Similarly, albeit on a subtler level, Gorman’s near-rhyme of ‘open’ with ‘broken’ may also be a delicate echo of Audre Lorde’s poem ‘Coal’, in which Lorde defiantly celebrated her identity as a black woman through a similar near-rhyme of ‘open’ and ‘spoken’.

The empowering tone of both Angelou’s and Lorde’s poems is present in Gorman’s, as if she is accepting the baton from these earlier poets and – neatly for a poem about collective action and solidarity between women – encouraging collaboration and unity, as other women add their voices to the lone woman calling for change.

Themes

A key theme of ‘We Rise’ is the notion of collective responsibility. The poem highlights the importance of supporting and uplifting other women, amplifying their voices, and creating a space for them to thrive.

Part of this message involves an emphasis on leadership and change. Gorman envisions a future where women are leading the way, bringing about positive change, and inspiring others to speak up. Her poem implies that this requires imaginative vision as well as courage and strength: leaders should, she suggests, be visionaries of a kind, people who are able to see ahead to a brighter future and bring that inspiring vision to others.

In the last analysis, ‘We Rise’ serves as a call to action, urging women to rise together, empower each other, and fight for a brighter future.

Form

The form of ‘We Rise’ is worth commenting on, because although the poem lacks a regular rhyme scheme, there are many points in the poem where Gorman joins two lines together with a rhyme to create a rhyming couplet (as in the ‘eyes’ and ‘rise’ rhyme of the poem’s opening two lines) or connects two non-adjacent lines via rhyme or pararhyme (‘spirit’ and ‘hear it’, for example).

So we cannot really label this a free verse poem, because there are plenty of moments of rhyme or pararhyme at the ends of the lines, and lots of internal rhyme, too (for instance, in the couplet ‘knowing … where it is blowing’). Gorman strikes a balance between formal restriction and completely free verse, using – as we find also in her other poems, such as her most famous, ‘The Hill We Climb’ – similar devices and techniques (end rhyme, pararhyme, internal rhyme) to those we find in rap and hip-hop lyrics. The rhythms, in other words, are a little more natural and unpredictable than they would be in, say, a poem written in perfect iambic pentameter.

Other techniques

At several points in ‘We Rise’, Gorman uses a rhetorical device known as anaphora, whereby the same word or words are repeated at the beginning of successive lines or clauses (so ‘Today … Today’ in the first three lines of the poem, or ‘To bring …’ later in the poem). This brings together the ideas of the poem but also underscores these particular moments for additional emphasis.

Although this is not a poem with a great deal of figurative language, metaphors are also important at several moments in the poem. The focus on dawn, day, and light emphasises the newer, better world women can create if they step into the light and support each other in making their voices heard and pushing for greater visibility. Similarly, the recurring image of the wind blowing summons not only the idea of predicting the future (women should be ‘predictors’ as well as ‘victors’, as Gorman has it) but also the well-known phrase ‘the wind of change’.