In This Place (An American Lyric)

Amanda Gorman

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Sleeping Giant

In the fifth stanza, Gorman mentions “the great sleeping giant / of Lake Michigan” (Lines 26-27), a personification of a geologic feature of the landscape that is “defiantly raising / its big blue head” (Lines 27-28). This symbol can refer to America as a whole, with its colonial origins and slow response to social justice issues; in this reading, the giant’s sleep echoes our lack of attention to climate change. However, the giant is an incredibly powerful being with the potential to be defiant against the norm and take a valuable stand, as demonstrated by many of the protest events in her poem. This landmark is “blazed into frozen soil” (Line 29), suggesting a long history of remaining inactive. Yet it is also “strutting upward and aglow” (Line 30), which implies hope and action for the giant, a thing that can both frighten and be friendly under varying circumstances.

Tyrants

The poem praises the genre of poetry, which it upholds as a method of resistance and empowerment: “Tyrants fear the poet” (Line 67) because poets are truth-tellers, because they can inflame and animate a crowd of listeners, and because their words reveal the deeper connections between disparate world events. Stanza 10 calls on poets—who, in the poem, are all Americans—to use this opportunity to share their voices and spread their stories: “[N]ow that we know it / we can’t blow it” (Lines 68-69). By emphasizing the importance of freedom of expression, the poem echoes the right to free speech enshrined in the Constitution’s First Amendment, which was intended to prevent political leaders and those in power from becoming tyrants who cannot be criticized. The poem defines poetry as a kind of citizen journalism—an expression of objective truths about the kind of country America should aspire to be.

Flame

In the poem, fire functions as a destructive force that opposes the optimism and future-facing hope of poetry. In the second stanza, the speaker-poet describes the tribulations of the Library of Congress, where “collections burned and [were] reborn twice” (Line 10). Despite the devastation of the fire that decimated the Library’s holdings, this institution did not fold—instead, it rebuilt and started anew. The poem uses this literal incident of emerging from the ashes as an allegory for the burning and rebirths that occur in the United States more figuratively.

In the poem’s fourth stanza, the Unite the Right protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 create a “ring of flame” (Line 18) with their tiki torches. This fire literally shines a spotlight on the acts of white nationalists, revealing their inhumanly pale bluish skin and zombie-like statue bodies. The flames are a destructive image that recalls the burning crosses used by the terrorist members of the KKK and foreshadows the poem’s subsequent encomium for Heather Heyer, killed by one of the neo-fascists. The poem hopes that the white supremacists’ torchlight, used to intimidate marginalized people and women, will lead to the uprising of the progressive movement and the figurative burning of racist, sexist, and homophobic laws so the United States can be reborn as a nation owned by all of its people.