Previous Next

“Still I Rise” consists of nine stanzas, the first seven of which are quatrains with a clear ABCB rhyme scheme. The poem’s final stanzas approximate the same form, but they are less immediately recognizable as quatrains due to the repeated insertion of the phrase “I rise” as distinct lines. This shift in the formal structure of the stanza reflects a parallel tonal shift in the poem, from defiant confrontation to celebration. Throughout the first seven stanzas, the speaker focuses on confronting and defying oppressive social expectations. She does this by addressing a series of rhetorical questions and declarations to an unspecified “you,” who represents American society at large. The second stanza provides a representative example of the speaker’s address (lines 5–8):

     Does my sassiness upset you?
     Why are you beset with gloom?
     ‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
     Pumping in my living room.

Here, the speaker begins by asking two rhetorical questions. She then answers the second of her questions by declaring that the “you” addressed here had been caught off guard by the sheer confidence of the speaker’s strut. Each of the poem’s first seven stanzas use the same ABCB rhyme scheme exemplified in the above passage, and they address “you” in a similar way.

In the final two stanzas, however, the speaker shifts her attention from “you” and begins to focus on her own emergence into a state of flourishing. As she breaks from the burdens of oppression and repeatedly asserts her personal ascendance, the very form of the quatrains begins to break apart (lines 29–34):

     Out of the huts of history’s shame
     I rise
     Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
     I rise
     I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
     Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

The insertion of “I rise” as separate lines isn’t the only interruption to the prior stanza form. Also note how the rhyme scheme has changed from ABCB to a couplet form: AABB. The final stanza takes this formal transformation even further by retaining the AABB rhyme scheme and inserting three additional iterations of “I rise” at the end. As these refrains of “I rise” interrupt the quatrain form and declare the speaker’s resilience, the poem leaves its prior tone of defiance behind and embraces a celebratory vision of expansion and liberation.

Previous section Tone Next section Meter

Take a Study Break