Still I Rise: Motifs

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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

“I rise”

The phrase “I rise” appears many times in the poem, repeatedly communicating the speaker’s strength and resilience. It also references her capacity to transcend historical trauma and societal oppression. Although the refrain “I rise” repeats throughout the whole poem, its presence grows especially pronounced near the end. In the final two stanzas, the refrain takes on a life of its own, disrupting the quatrain form of the previous stanzas by inserting itself between the longer lines. Consider the poem’s eighth stanza, where the disruption begins (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 the repeating phrase “I rise” breaks up the standard quatrain form of the poem’s other stanzas. These insertions create the suggestion that the speaker herself is breaking through the limiting expectations society has placed on her. The disruption to the quatrain form becomes even more radical in the ninth and final stanza. There, the speaker inserts “I rise” after the first and second lines of the quatrain. She also adds three additional iterations of the phrase after the final line of the quatrain: “I rise / I rise / I rise” (lines 41–43). This repetition functions as a kind of mantra for the speaker, powerfully affirming her strength and resilience.

Natural Resources

At several points in the poem, the speaker references valuable natural resources as a way of proclaiming her own sense of self-worth. In particular, the speaker mentions oil, gold, and diamonds, and she does so in moments of especially potent defiance. In the second stanza (lines 6–8), for instance, the speaker begins by confronting “you” with her “sassiness,” then she asks:

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

The speaker describes how she struts with a sense of pride and power that could be associated with the kind of wealth generated by oil. If she has “oil wells / Pumping in [her] living room,” that means she has her own source of wealth and doesn’t need to rely on her oppressive society to develop a sense of self-worth. It is because she insists on her intrinsic value that the “you” she addresses is distraught. The speaker makes a similar point when, in the fifth stanza, she claims that she’s “got gold mines / Diggin’ in [her] own backyard” (lines 19–20), and when, in the seventh stanza, she says she’s “got diamonds / At the meeting of [her] thighs” (lines 27–28). In each case, she rejects external sources of value and celebrates her own self-worth.

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