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In many editions of the poem that may be found online, “The Hill We Climb” is presented as a single unbroken stanza. However, in the version that appeared in Gorman’s second poetry collection, Call Us What We Carry (2021), the poem is broken into ten stanzas of varied length. Over the course of these ten stanzas, the speaker passes through a range of images, metaphors, and ideas that, taken together, reflect the current state of the nation. However, despite this range of references, the poem is structured around two key tropes: the dawning of a new day and the climbing of a hill. The first of these tropes serves as a framing device for the poem, which both opens and closes with references to the dawn. Here are the poem’s opening lines:

When day comes, we ask ourselves:
Where can we find light
In this never-ending shade?

The speaker then reprises this imagery in the poem’s final stanza (lines 93–98):

When day comes, we step out of the shade,
Aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it,
For there is always light,
If only we’re brave enough to see it,
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

Gorman’s use of the dawn as a framing device symbolically references the occasion for which the poem was written: the presidential inauguration, which marks the cusp of a new administration. This image also alludes to the dawn imagery so prominent in Maya Angelou’s inauguration poem from 1993, “On the Pulse of the Morning.”

If the trope of a new dawn presides over the poem’s opening and conclusion, the middle section is loosely structured around the trope of a hill. The speaker builds up to this trope by outlining some of the ways the United States’s troubling past continues to haunt its present. She insists that it’s possible to bridge the divides that persist between Americans and to work together toward a better future. However, the work will be difficult and daunting. In the eighth stanza, the speaker frames this important work as an uphill struggle (lines 44–49):

If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory
Won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promised glade,
The hill we climb, if only we dare it:
Because being American is more than a pride we inherit—
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.

Though an uphill struggle is, by definition, grueling, the benefits far outweigh the cost. After all, once the uphill struggle is complete, the nation will be symbolically elevated. The speaker emphasizes as much in her ecstatic refrain, “We will rise,” which appears repeatedly in lines 83–87. And from this vantage at the top of the hill we will be able to witness the sun rising on a new day. In this way, the poem ends where it began: with the possibility of a new dawn.

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