The tone of “Still I Rise” is confrontational, defiant, and ultimately celebratory. The poem’s confrontational tone emerges in the opening lines (lines 1–4), in which the speaker confidently addresses an unspecified “you”:

     You may write me down in history
     With your bitter, twisted lies,
     You may trod me in the very dirt
     But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

These lines indicate that an antagonistic relationship exists between the speaker and the “you” she addresses. But even as the speaker confronts this “you” for the harm they have done, she also powerfully defies them. In the final line of the passage quoted here, the speaker claims that, regardless of what “you” have done to keep her down, she’s strong and resilient enough to rise again and survive. And not just survive, but thrive. By the poem’s end, after using several rhetorical questions to confront and defy other types of discrimination perpetrated by this “you,” the speaker turns from critique to celebration: “Leaving behind nights of terror and fear / I rise / Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear / I rise” (lines 35–38). These lines describe the speaker’s emergence from a time of trauma into an era of flourishing. Following her confrontational defiance of harmful social expectations, the speaker celebrates her own resilience and capacity to thrive in the face of oppression.