Still I Rise: Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Dust

The speaker of “Still I Rise” uses dust to symbolize the resilience that she shares with other Black Americans, and particularly Black American women. She mentions dust in the poem’s opening stanza, where she at once acknowledges and rejects American society’s attempt to crush her spirit. She says: “You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise” (lines 3–4). The simile through which the speaker compares herself to dust is straightforward. Just as dust floats into the air when you try to stomp it down, the speaker will rise above the attempt to suppress her. Yet the speaker’s choice to feature dust in this way has an additional meaning. Dust is typically understood as being unpleasant and even disruptive. When it rises from the dirt and suffuses the air, it can irritate the eyes and send the lungs into spasm. If the speaker is indeed like dust, it isn’t simply because she resists all attempts to suppress her. It’s also because, in resisting, she actively disrupts and aggravates the very system that does the suppressing. The speaker acknowledges the hidden power of dust, and she claims a similar hidden strength.

The Ocean

In the eighth stanza, the speaker uses metaphor to liken herself to an ocean. She says: “I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, / Welling and swelling I bear in the tide” (lines 33–34). In these two short lines, the speaker uses the ocean to evoke a range of symbolic associations. For one thing, her reference to the oceanic tides recalls her words from the third stanza:

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Here (lines 9–12), the speaker insists that her resilience is as certain as the celestial choreography of the sun and moon, as well as the tidal shifts created by their movement. The speaker’s return to tidal imagery later in the poem makes the ocean into a symbol of her transcendence of oppression. This transcendence becomes even more powerful when we observe that the ocean is a symbol of historical trauma for Black Americans, whose enslaved ancestors were transported to the New World across the Atlantic Ocean. Yet even as the speaker acknowledges the trauma of crossing the ocean, she also identifies the ocean with femininity, and especially with childbirth. As indicated by the line, “Welling and swelling I bear in the tide,” the speaker emphasizes the ocean’s reproductive capacity, able to birth something new.

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