Americaa

Perhaps the poem's most central theme is the complex relationship between the nation-state and the disenfranchised. With the vampiric image of America drinking the speaker's blood and stealing his "breath of life," the opening lines of the poem establish the premise that the "mother country" feeds off the bodies of its marginalized populations, needing them to sustain itself even as it continues to oppress them. In a similarly paradoxical way, the speaker refers to America's "vigor" giving him "strength erect against her hate," highlighting a strange dependency where the speaker needs America's antagonism to fuel his own masculine potency.