The Hill We Climb Amanda Gorman Summary

During the inauguration of President Joe Biden in 2021, the Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman recited her poem “The Hill We Climb”. This poem explores the dichotomies of life, especially those within America. She exposes how life involves light and darkness, hope and fear, and the past and the future. Further, she looks to inspire people to be brave and make the choice about which side to nurture in their lives. The one most important word in Amanda Gorman’s poem, “The Hill We Climb,” is ‘we’ because, not only does it appear in the poem 65 times, but it is also the one word that consciously and consistently keeps the goal of the poem in mind – that as a nation Americans are united much more than any differences might indicate. Further, that

She opens her poem saying, “When day comes we ask ourselves, /‘where can we find light in this never ending shade,’” (Gorman, 2021). In this way, Gorman immediately creates a sense of unity and togetherness by bonding the audience to herself and to each other as a ‘we’. She unreservedly states that they are unified in their identity and that they, as Americans, have together experienced an environment that perpetuates the light-and-dark dichotomy. Further, she implies that this dichotomy is not necessarily natural, as if it were, they would not come to the eventuality that they did not want to live in a shaded world alone. In this way she unites the audience under one premise; that they had all been given an opportunity to change not only the nation, but the world

Twice she referred to the ‘light’ which can be seen as a metonym for ‘hope’. Therefore, when she says, “For there is always light, /if only we’re brave enough to see it, /if only we’re brave enough to be it” (Gorman, 2021), she really means to imply there is always hope. In this way, she encourages her audience to look for that hope and let go of the fear of the unknown. She acknowledges that it is not an easy task, and as such requires bravery, but that bravery is overwhelmingly worth it when it comes to the legacy left behind for the coming generations. This premise is further cemented by the fact that she also states that she knows that their “…inaction and inertia/ will be the inheritance of the next generation” (Gorman, 2021) if the ‘we’ of today does not step up and create the world they would want their children to live