![]() The speaker is such a woman, who nevertheless finds something to call her ‘own’ when she looks to the sun, the rain, the oceans, and the mountains: nature’s bounty. This poem is perhaps the best example of this theme in Angelou’s poetry. Another important strand to her work is work itself: a focus on the daily menial tasks which many wives and mothers have to carry out around the home as part of their domestic duties. ![]() Many of Maya Angelou’s best-known poems focus on the plight of women, and specifically Black women. Yet Angelou tells us that the girl in the poem is ‘blameless’, inviting us to read the poem as about ‘mothers’ and ‘daughters’ in a wider sense: it is about the generational shift between African-American women of Angelou’s mother’s age, and those of Angelou’s own generation. ![]() ![]() The subject of the poem is a girl who goes home to her mother’s arms, afraid and ‘creeping’ because she fears she is in trouble. The poem concludes with the image of an insistent drumbeat which marks the rhythm of social change which the speaker and others involved in civil rights have established. ![]()
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