Critical Analysis: Alone, By Maya Angelou

“You’re the people’s poet,” said Malcolm X to Maya Angelou in a letter exchange. Indeed, Angelou was the people’s poet. She truly knew how to relate to others’ feelings and struggles, which the common themes in her work were identity, family and racism. For the longest period of her life, she has been a pioneer in the African American poetry and an advocate of the Civil Rights movement.

Moreover, her ability to relate others may come from her own experience. Angelou was born into an African-American family in St. Louis, Missouri. She had a difficult childhood with parents divorcing, experiences of sexual abuse in addition to racial discrimination. Later in life when she not only became a known poet but also an actress and a screenwriter, she started to reflect the isolation that she has felt throughout her life. As a result became the poem “Alone”.

Despite the use of a non-complex vocabulary, the surface story tells about a narrator who is lying and philosophizing about where the soul belongs. The narrator, which the gender is unknown, concludes that no one can find peace within oneself alone. It later proceeds to apply this

This is again repeated several times throughout the poem: “Alone, all alone/ Nobody, but nobody/Can make it out here alone”. “It” is the happiness that Angelou are referring to. In order to experience bliss, one must interact with others or find a place where one belongs. She illustrates this with a religious reference in the first stanza: “How to find my soul a home / Where water is not thirsty / And bread loaf is not stone”. It is scientifically impossible for water to be “thirsty” or bread loaf having a consistency of a stone. However, when even water or bread is out of its natural order then one’s soul is not affiliated with this world. Angelou suggests that the heart belongs to