Summary
The speaker instructs humanity to look into the oncoming day and give birth to a dream of the future. The speaker tells listeners to shape the dream according to their own hopes and desires. In this way they can throw off the fear that holds them back. Now, people can have the courage to look at the landscape, which belongs to them all—from the wealthiest to the poorest, and from the ancient mastodons to the present-day humans. As a new day begins, the speaker instructs her listeners to look into the eyes of their fellow humans and wish them a good morning.
Analysis
If the middle section of this poem was devoted to diagnosing a problem and recounting the ills of history, these final stanzas are instead about looking into and building the future. The speaker instructs listeners to take seemingly small steps in order to bring about radical change. Firstly, the poem tells us, it is important to simply dream of a better world. This dreaming demands discipline and thoughtfulness, however. Angelou uses the metaphor of sculpting to demonstrate that this dreaming is conscious, skilled work. Angelou also uses the metaphor of birth to describe this work of dreaming. By invoking motherhood, she suggests that political change is an act of nurturing and care, and that it requires the labor of multiple generations with a shared goal. The poem closes with an urge to turn these dreams into action, but the action suggested is a small one: simply wishing others good morning. The poem therefore suggests that the acknowledgment of shared humanity, minor though it may seem, can be a starting point for much bigger changes: a reduction of war, oppression, and environmental harm.
As the poem ends, the speaker claims that the natural landscape belongs in equal measure to the rich and the poor, and to the past and the present. Angelou invokes wealth through an allusion to Midas, a Greek mythological king who turned all he touched to gold. She invokes poverty with the word "mendicant," a word that means "beggar," but has Christian, monastic connotations. Meanwhile, she alludes to the past by once again mentioning mastodons. Through words from these various realms—the classical, the Christian, and the prehistoric—Angelou once again broadens the scale of the poem, expanding outward from American history into a much longer history and tying modern political struggles to universal stories. The alliterative "M" that begins all of these words further emphasizes the similarity between these epochs and milieus. The poem gains its energy from toggling between these two scales—one enormous, dramatic, and transhistorical, alluding to everything from Midas to Mastodons, and the other private and intimate, centered around polite conversations and secret hopes.
