Summary
The speaker asks the reader to join her in celebrating the fact that she has managed to create something like a full life for herself. She has done so despite not having any model to follow, and despite being born in a state of exile and persecution as both a non-white person and a woman. She could become nobody except for herself. So she improvised, within the limited space between bodily existence and spiritual transcendence, clasping her hands tightly together. She urges the reader to celebrate the fact that every day something has tried to kill her and she has survived.
Analysis
This is a small, concise, and direct poem. It consists of a single fourteen-line stanza, and its lines are short. Its diction is extremely simple and accessible. Moreover, the speaker's voice is generally direct and unpretentious. Even its lack of capitalization contributes to this simple straightforwardness. Clifton uses only lowercase letters. This makes the poem appear informal, even spontaneous. This simplicity and directness contribute to two contradictory impressions. At the start of the poem, the speaker comes across as rushed and shy. She seems too timid to indulge in anything but the most literal and direct, not to mention quick, type of rhetoric. By the poem's end, though, this directness instead seems bold. The speaker is confident in herself and in the points she is making, and seems proud of what she has achieved. The directness of the work's closing lines instead seems like an expression of unapologetic certainty.
The speaker's initial hesitancy seems to stem from the fact that, by her own admission, her life may seem unimpressive—she describes it as a "kind of life." Over the course of the work, though, Clifton works with themes of race and gender to explain why the speaker's life is a cause for celebration and excitement. Because she has been oppressed on the basis of her gender and race, the poem explains, the speaker has started her life at a disadvantage, with outside forces putting her survival at risk. This means that the fact that she is alive to narrate the poem is far from being a given, and is instead an impressive accomplishment.
Clifton makes use of allusions, and in particular biblical allusions, to make these points. The speaker describes herself as having been "born in babylon." This is a reference to the exile of the ancient Israelites in the city of Babylon, recounted in Psalm 137's well-known lines "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept/when we remembered Zion." Clifton here speaks to an exile that is in a sense literal—the forced movement of enslaved people from Africa to the Americas—and in another sense figurative, speaking to a more general state of ostracism and exclusion. Even as the speaker describes herself as having had "no model," she ties her plight to the struggles of others in history through allusion, making clear that her situation is both historically specific and linked to universal human emotions. By inviting the reader to join her in celebration, the speaker again seems to reach outward, seeking connection as one cure for the loneliness and terror of oppression.
While this work is written in free verse, it contains subtle echoes of formal poetic traditions. It is fourteen lines long—the length of a sonnet. The sonnet traditionally follows constraints beyond simply length, though the specific rhyme and meter of a sonnet vary depending on the sonnet sub-type. However, in general, sonnets have a "volta," or a shift in tone, mood, focus, or perspective, somewhere in their second half. In this sense, Clifton seems to take inspiration from the sonnet form. Her speaker's perspective evolves, with the poem's tone shifting from cautious and apologetic to bold and certain. The work's images, meanwhile, become more vivid and fantastical, such as "here on this bridge between / starshine and clay." In the poem's final lines, the speaker tells rather than asks the listener to celebrate with her. In other words, like a sonnet, the poem takes a sharp and striking turn.
