Christina Kim
Padilla
Period 2
28 October 2015
Living the Life in Angelou’s Perspective Words are the most powerful devices a person possesses, it can hold strong meanings in the slightest ways. At a young age Maya Angelou did not experience as much pleasant memories as she did when she was older. She experienced first hand racial prejudices and discrimination and at the age of eight years old, Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend which led him to go to jail for one day. When he was released from prison he was murdered and Angelou thought it was her fault. After that incident Angelou was mute for almost 5 years. In one of Maya Angelou’s biographies she said "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name.
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Maya Angelou was a strong feminist and civil rights activist and worked along with Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. Being an civil rights activist and an advocate for women’s rights, Angelou wrote many of her works with themes relating to women, race, freedom, slavery, and the painful lives of the blacks. Many of Angelou’s poems were also written from experiences that she went through during her life. Maya Angelou started to write poetry at a young age and she used her writing of poetry as a way to handle her bad memories of being raped at a young age, which is shown in her poem I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings which addresses racism, insecurity, and abuse. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as well as many other poems such as Human Family she uses rhyme and rhythm in her poem. Most of her poems contain end rhyme in each stanza which helps the poem flow and echo the previous lines. The rhyme in her poems also make the poem sound like songs, which helps portray them as songs that were sung by the blacks during the time of slavery. The rhyme schemes that are present help the …show more content…
By separating the last two lines as couplets, it makes the lines stand out more by adding a pause between them when they are read aloud, which would not have been achieved if the lines were combined to be a quatrain. This allows the reader to take in the last lines with more emphasis and meaning, leaving a lasting impact on the