The Lesson

The poem opens like a Christian prayer of supplication: “I keep on dying” (Line 1), the speaker proclaims in the opening line, implying that this death comes again and again. “The Lesson” begins in the mood and tone of an old-school jeremiad, echoing the plaint of centuries of Christians laid low by suffering who inevitably turn their eyes upward and embrace the sturdy faith that promises the reward of the radiant afterlife when this life of tears and suffering ends. We are, the logic follows, sinners in the hands of a wrathful, righteous God. Living in the wreckage of Eden, we are pilgrims journeying in prayerful hope toward the spacious grace of heaven.

In this feeling of despair, the poem at least initially echoes a passage from the Bible that Angelou often quoted in her public appearances and interviews: “Is it nothing to you, all you that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like my sorrow, which is done to me by the Lord who has afflicted me in the day of his wrath” (Lamentations 1:12). This dramatic posture is suggested by the elegant lamentation of the opening four lines. The speaker asks rhetorically if anybody’s suffering is as keen as their own, each trauma like some excruciating death that happens again and again. By refusing to turn the poem into a first-person confessional and introduce the particular griefs of her own life—racism, sexual violence, poverty, professional setbacks, relationship failures, sexism, aging—Angelou allows the speaker to open out into a sort of collective first-person. The “I” (Lines 1, 12, 13) speaks for all the anxious, over-tired, and over-tasked pilgrims struggling to handle the hardships of life.

The poem darkens as Lines 2-4 increase the sense of helplessness. The poet suggests that the trials and traumas in life, these metaphoric emotional and psychological deaths experienced every day, are as regular, as inevitable, and as predictable as the opening and closing of the fists of a sleeping child. The poem isolates the word “[c]hildren,” giving the word its own line, to suggest at this point the dark irony of life’s incessant and unyielding troubles by comparing them to a traditional symbol of hope, a sleeping child. This vascular opening and closing action, however, does provide the poem with its first intimation of a strategy for survival. After all, the heart, whatever the agonies, continues its heroic rhythm. And that rhythm is nothing the speaker controls. Rather, the urgency to survive is compared to an automatic reflex, like the fists of a sleeping child opening and closing. This gives the poem its first suggestion of the energy of survival and endurance.

The poem, however, then sinks into its darkest moment when the poet accepts that these heartaches, disappointments, and miseries are just harbingers of the much greater terror each person must come to face: death itself. Lines 5-7 reveal that death, physical death itself, is much on the speaker’s mind. The deep-cut lines that the poet notes in studying her reflection in the mirror (Lines 9-10) suggest that the speaker is themself edging into old age (Angelou was turning 50 when she completed the poem). For the speaker, death has become less an abstract idea and more a terrifying reality involving, as the speaker notes, not the much-promised and much-anticipated heavenly translation into transcendent glory but rather a hole in the ground and the ghastly experience of “rotting flesh and worms” (Line 6). Within traditional Christian prayer, this would be the moment when the speaker taps into the consolation of the Christian afterlife and the promise that after journeying through the dark portal of death, the soul will arise, resurrected phoenix-like from the wreckage of the material world and life’s routine indignities and agonies.

But this poem does not move toward affirmation of the Christian promise of the afterlife to compensate for the life of pain and suffering. That is not the lesson the speaker offers. In a dramatic move in Lines 7-8, the speaker admits that despite the experience of loss and the nearness of despair, despite the grim evidence of life’s anxieties etched into the lines of their face, and despite the inevitability of death, they will rise to the “challenge” (Line 8) to live, not just to endure but rather to triumph. Those “[l]ines” (Line 10) that are “deep” (Line 9) in the speaker’s face suggest that the speaker is older or at least feels ancient. It is difficult for the speaker to acknowledge those lines, the reality of those years of pain. So much suffering, the speaker suggests, can overwhelm the spirit, can make a person indifferent to life, surrender to defeat, and in turn deny wonder and beauty to the experience of every moment. Still, it is not for the speaker to yearn for the release of death. There is too much living still to do. Angelou’s inspirational optimism is shared in the closing couplet: “I keep on dying / Because I love to live” (Lines 12-13). Here, the speaker, tasked and tested, is grateful for every moment of life, the tragic, the comic, the heroic, the ironic. Every moment affirms the complicated drama of being alive.

Nothing in that assertion makes sense. Conventional wisdom offers that a person loves life despite the experience of loss and pain. The speaker, however, loves life because of its pain. Pain gives life is grandeur and its depth. Surviving such traumas endows the spirit with dignity and gifts the speaker, ironically, with a reason to love life more. Nothing, no experience, can shatter that optimism or temper that joyance. That is the lesson the speaker shares. Despair is easy; optimism is the trick.

For the speaker, there is always tomorrow, stormy or sunny, glorious or lonely, and the poem celebrates that heroic, triumphant sense of earned gratitude. What begins as a Christian supplication, a crie de coeur from the depths of suffering humanity, soars in this closing couplet to a stirring declaration of emotional independence as the poet challenges the reader to rise above the day-to-day hardships and the overwhelming powerlessness that comes with such traumas and to tap the profound spiritual strength of affirmation.