Still I Rise

As I was reading throughout the packets of all the poems, one really stood out to me. Even though it was the first poem on the first page of the packet, it was very powerful. I felt like I could use it and understand it more than the other poems. The poem I read was “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou. It is an incredibly powerful poem written by someone with such a rough background. It really shows how she pushed through life and what she did to get through everything she went through. What this poem tells me is that no matter how long or how hard you get knocked down, you should always persevere.
The end of the first stanza says “You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise.” (Lines 3-4) This has a great hook into the poem and this was one of the lines that convinced me to write about this poem. It talks about how if you knock me down into the dirt and step on me, I’ll rise like something as little as dust. It compares herself to dust which I really found interesting. Something so small and meaningless does something so powerful. It was a great simile and she uses this method throughout the poem.
She went from trod in the dirt to kill me with hatefulness. I think she used this to show how far she will go through to end up persevering in the end. The author is willing to go through anything life puts her through. She then goes from dust to air. They are both really small, and I don’t know if she was intending on making it smaller, but I thought it was really cool how she did that. It kind of says that no matter how small you are, you have the ability to rise from anything. The author uses another simile but also increases and escalates her word choice which really made the poem more powerful and rise in