won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life?
These opening lines are in the form of a rhetorical question—a question that seeks to make a point rather than obtain an answer. Still, while the reader cannot provide a response, the question is searching and uncertain. The speaker's tone is apologetic as she implores the reader to celebrate. This apologetic tone intensifies with the phrase "a kind of life," with "kind of" modifying and undermining the noun "life." The speaker seems to suggest that she has been unable to create a full life for herself, achieving only an imitation of it. Overall, even as the speaker asks the reader to join her celebration, she suggests that there is little to celebrate.
here on this bridge between starshine and clay,
Here, Clifton frames life as a state of tension and struggle between the bodily, physical, and earthly on the one hand, and the celestial, artistic and spiritual on the other. These lines echo those of the Romantic poet John Keats, who wrote of a state "betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay" (from the sonnet "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again"). The word "clay" also carries resonances of the biblical Book of Genesis, in which God shapes humanity out of earth—with this subtle allusion, the speaker suggests that she has had to give her existence a form, starting from scratch like a god creating life. Through these allusions, the speaker ties her own specific struggles to those of humanity in general, positioning herself as an heir to generations of attempts to find meaning in the space between the earthly and the spiritual.
come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.
The poem's closing lines are stark and dramatic, framing the speaker's struggles in life-or-death terms, and to a degree personifying the causes of those struggles. The "something" that has tried to kill her is positioned here not as a conceptual enemy or a nebulous set of circumstances but a malicious and purpose-driven being. Meanwhile, the speaker's voice here becomes forceful, a far cry from the apologetic tone that marked the early lines of the poem. Rather than asking the reader to celebrate, the speaker instructs them to join her in celebration. Having reflected over the course of the poem on her lifetime of struggle, the speaker concludes with a renewed sense of her own accomplishments, authority, and worthiness.
