Let America Be America Again: Important Quotes Explained

(America never was America to me.)

Line 5 directly follows the poem’s first stanza, which calls for the restoration of the original dream of America. Notably, the first stanza is a rhyming quatrain and marks the opening of what turns out to be a complete sonnet. Between the quatrains of this sonnet, which celebrate an idealistic vision of America, Hughes has inserted single-line critiques of this vision. The line quoted above contains the first of these critiques. Aside from the direct contradiction of a free America, what’s most significant about these critiques is the fact that Hughes presents them in parentheses. In ordinary writing, parentheses serve to present interesting or useful information that is not, strictly speaking, essential. In this way, parenthetical statements stand outside the main text. The same thing is happening here, where the parenthetical lines stand outside the sonnet. Thus, although their presence in the poem actively interrupts and destabilizes the sonnet form, these parenthetical statements are marked as asides. The critiques voiced in these statements are thus still held in a subordinate position to the idealistic vision presented in the main parts of the sonnet. Only in the poem’s second section will the speaker give full voice to these critiques.

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

Lines 17–18, which appear in italics in the original poem, mark out a fleeting moment between the end of the opening sonnet and the beginning of the speaker’s full-on critique of American unfreedom. Here, the speaker shifts registers and speaks briefly in the second person, addressing a “you.” Although the speaker doesn’t specify the identity of this “you,” it’s reasonable to assume that they are addressing us readers. It’s also reasonable to assume that the speaker associates this “you” with the underprivileged classes that will form the subject of the rest of the poem. The speaker’s description of a “you” who “mumbles in the dark” may refer oppressed folks who feel they cannot raise their voices or speak clearly in the light of day. The speaker also addresses a “you” who “draws your veil across the stars.” Here, they may be referencing those disaffected folks who feel they have no cause to cast their hopeful eyes to the stars—a symbol of aspiration for upward mobility. By addressing the reader in these lines, the speaker attempts to capture our attention and thereby prepare us for the poem’s culminating call to collective action.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

In lines 39–50, the speaker demonstrates their gift for assuming the point of view of a diverse range of Americans. Here, as elsewhere in the poem, the speaker uses the first person to speak from several different perspectives. In this case, they speak for immigrants from Europe and the British Isles who fled the oppressive forces of monarchy and religion, exchanging those for the promised freedom of American democracy. They also speak on behalf of Africans who were violently “torn” from their native lands and forced—as the speaker puts it ironically—“to build a ‘homeland of the free.’” By adopting these different points of view, the speaker achieves what we might call a “polyvocal” perspective. Such a perspective serves their larger purpose of invoking a sense of class solidarity among people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

The speaker concludes the poem with these rousing words from lines 80–86. Here, the speaker pulls out all the rhetorical stops as they attempt to inspire us readers to band together in a spirit of solidarity and collectively take back the land the ruling classes have stolen. And not just take back the land but redeem it—a word that means to compensate for past wrongs, but which also carries spiritual connotations, such as the Christian concept of redemption from sin. Such a redemption is the speaker’s ultimate goal, which would result in successfully “mak[ing] America again.” Although alliteration abounds in this passage, the speaker’s language arguably derives most of its rhetorical power from an allusion to the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, which famously begins with the words, “We the People of the United States. . .” When the speaker says, “We, the people,” they are referencing the well-known document and thereby reinvigorating the original dream for a free and equal America.