America

The poem expresses deep and powerful feelings about America within the discipline of the 14-line sonnet form. The first three lines could hardly be a more damning indictment of the United States. America is personified as a feminine figure—a mother—as “she” feeds him “bread of bitterness” (Line 1). Bitterness is a natural reaction to what the speaker must endure, and in a way, it sustains him. The personification of America retains its femininity but becomes animalistic, tearing at the speaker’s throat like a wild animal—a tiger—who is aiming to kill. The next line implies the attack is, on some level, lethal, “[s]tealing [his] breath of life” (Line 3).

However, those images of aggression and victimhood are not the entire story. America is more than its fierce hostility to the Black race. In Line 4, the speaker admits he loves America, though he considers it a “cultured hell.” He may mean that America is a hell that has been created by human—that is, white—culture; the hell is an artifice, and there is nothing natural about it. However, he could simply be pointing out that America has a sophisticated culture; perhaps he is thinking of the arts or about the broader cultural life of the nation. In either case, it is a “hell” because African Americans are largely excluded from it. Nevertheless, in spite of everything, he loves America, for reasons explained in Lines 5-7 with water imagery: America is a vast land with huge energy, flowing through the poet like a flood simply by virtue of his being there. As he absorbs that power and energy, it gives him the “strength” (Line 6) to withstand the hatred directed at him and his race.

After the speaker admits his counterintuitive love of America, Lines 8-10 take the idea further. In spite of all the provocation, he can control his anger and restrain his bitterness. America may rage at him, but he will not be intimated, and he will not rage back. Although he is at odds with the ruling racism that subordinates Black—an ethos depicted in the simile comparing the speaker to a rebel confronting a king—he feels “not a shred / Of terror” (Lines 9-10). He is dauntless. No longer the passive, childlike figure fed bitterness by mother America in Line 1, he is more than capable of meeting the challenge of injustice. As he stated earlier (in Line 4), America represents a test; part of his response to the test is that he feels no “malice” (Line 10), that is, he feels no desire to repay hatred with hatred. Nor will a single derisive word escape from his lips (“not a word of jeer” [Line 10]). The speaker is thereby effectively in a position of moral superiority, although he does not trumpet it. He is simply presenting his own feelings honestly.

The concluding four lines present a shift in tone, an almost mournful pensiveness. It may be almost with regret that he adopts the persona of the wise man and seer who looks into the future and sees America’s fate: “Darkly I gaze into the days ahead” (Line 11). The adverb “darkly” is foreshadowing. The phrase “the days ahead” suggests a short-term perspective, but what follows implies a longer vision. This may imply America’s fate will come sooner rather than later if it does not change its ways, or the speaker may be stepping back and taking a more universal view, since history evinces that all great civilizations eventually end. This is the “touch of Time’s unerring hand” (Line 13), the capitalization of “Time” showing its inexorable force; nothing can stand against it.

The imagery characterizing America changes again in these final lines, although the country retains its feminine pronoun “she.” Earlier taking shape through water imagery, America now changes to images of stone, as its buildings (“granite wonders” [Line 12]) eventually collapse and disappear into the sand (Line 14). The nation’s earlier vigor and strength is gone, and her “might” (Line 12) becomes a thing of the past, no longer like a mighty river. The speaker mourns what he sees as the passing of a great country, its faults notwithstanding; the final line refers to “her priceless treasures” (Line 14).