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The overall tone of “The Hill We Climb” is assured and hopeful. This tone is closely linked to the speaker’s critical yet ultimately optimistic vision of the United States. Over the course of the poem, the speaker intones in a language that is rhetorically sophisticated and often lyrical. The assured quality of this language expresses the speaker’s confidence in her understanding of the United States as a nation that hasn’t yet fully come to grips with its troubling past. The result of this failure is that the people remain fundamentally divided and therefore unable to come together with a unified sense of purpose. But as the speaker indicates repeatedly in the poem, this gap can be bridged if the people decide to set aside their differences. The speaker recognizes that it may be naïve to indulge in too much optimism about repairing the nation, which is why they insist that this process will be an uphill battle. But however challenging, the point is that the work of repair will raise the nation to new heights (lines 83–92):

We will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.
We will rise from the gold-limned hills of the West!
We will rise from the windswept Northeast, where our forefathers first realized revolution!
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states!
We will rise from the sunbaked South!
We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover
. . . 
We’ll emerge, battered but beautiful.

Nowhere does the speaker display their critical yet hopeful tone more clearly than in these rhetorically elevated lines, which mark the poem’s climax.

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