18 pages • 36 minutes read
Maya AngelouThe Lesson
Maya AngelouFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Virtue of Suffering
In an opening declaration of “I keep on dying again” (Line 1), the poem argues that suffering enhances the experience of life, an argument that runs counter to logic. Pain, suffering, and anxieties are negative pressures to be avoided. Whatever wonders the world has to offer, whatever positive energies can be felt every day, whatever the rewards of relationships—these are all marginalized, rendered ironic in the need to adjust to the dark weight of suffering.
The lesson that Angelou’s speaker shares, however, is that such suffering ennobles the human spirit, makes a person more aware, more alert, and, ironically, more alive. The experience of traumatic suffering day in and day out across years until suffering itself becomes the norm endows the spirit of the speaker, who endures such pain with a sense of imperial triumph. “I love to live” (Line 13), the poem concludes, suggesting that awareness of suffering gives that experience its spiritual reward.
It is not that the speaker embraces suffering or seeks it out. Rather, the speaker concedes, in keeping with Angelou’s Christian faith, that suffering is inevitable, and only the recklessly naïve or dangerously romantic pretend otherwise. Nor does the speaker melodramatically contemplate the act of suicide as a concession to suffering. Nor does the speaker minimize the experience of suffering. Indeed, the speaker compares it to ritualized dying, each humiliation, each hard experience, each agony like blood veins collapsing, like physical death itself—and suffering registers. The speaker sees the deep lines on their face that each experience has left. That experience, however, has gifted the speaker with an earned appreciation of the value and meaning of life itself that gifts the closing with its gravitas and nobility.
The Resilience of the Human Spirit
The impact of opening with “I keep on dying” (Line 1) cannot be overstated. Had “The Lesson” closed on this desperate concession in Line 12, Angelou’s poem would have been a dark witness-testimonial to the agonies inevitable in life. The poem would argue how one after another these trials, these “cold defeat[s]” (Line 9), whose impact is etched into the lines of the speaker’s face, erode the faith and courage to maintain the integrity of the spirit, even the will to live.
Instead, the poem closes with what can seem, at first reading, cruel irony, a taunting acknowledgement that despite these emotional pains that cause the cyclical “dying” (Line 1) in the opening, the body refuses to surrender to the logic of death itself. The speaker will not concede to the logic of death because “[they] love to live” (Line 13). This affirmation of the resilience of the human spirit allows the poem, however, to inspire encouragement, even hope. It is not simplistic defeatism or cloaking pessimism, or worse, the sado-masochistic reveling in pain; rather, it is the confirmation of the human spirit and its refusal to surrender to hardships, whatever they may be. Yes, the speaker’s eyes have dulled from the memories of the defeats, the agonies, the pain of life, but they cannot, will not abandon their love of living itself and the joy of rising to meet every day. Up from a past rooted in pain, defined by suffering, up from that difficult and traumatic past and its terrors and the fears, the speaker rises in the closing line to celebrate the spirit’s triumphant survival.
Our Shared Humanity
A poem that suggests how suffering ennobles the experience of life could easily be considered autobiographical. In what became her seven-volume autobiography, Angelou revealed her considerable life agonies, frustrations, and traumas. In that strategy, the affirmation of the value of suffering would elevate Angelou herself, suggest her own determination not to surrender to despair. But no mention is made of racism or sexism, violence or poverty, all elements of Angelou’s own life. In this, Angelou’s template could easily have been the dark, claustrophobic confessional poetry of the mid-century—Anne Sexton, for instance, or Sylvia Plath or John Berryman.
That the speaker refuses to enumerate their agonies, however, gives the poem its reach, its horizon: The “I” (Lines 1, 12, 13) speaks here for humanity itself. It is not that she, Maya Angelou, fought through her own life’s pain, struggled with her own haunted memories, but rather that all of us have our anxieties, our pain, our discouragements and disappointments. They are for all of us like experiencing the absolute cut of death itself over and over. No one escapes that. But the lesson Angelou offers is the reassurance that no one is alone in their suffering. In this, the closing line is a choral affirmation of hope, our collective will to live, sounded for all of us. Loss cannot be restored. Tragedy cannot be avoided. Pain cannot be skirted. But these difficulties, the poem suggests in its triumphant closing line, cannot destroy the human spirit and in the end create and ennoble the human community itself.
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