Lift Every Voice and Sing Analysis

Given that Johnson's poem was written to be sung, it can be characterized as a hymn. A hymn, of course, is a religious song, and Johnson's poem fits the bill because the last stanza of the poem is...

This poem isn't spoken by one speaker, but by several. It's a poem that asks everyone to join in. In fact, in the fourth line, the speakers explicitly say, "Let our rejoicing rise." It's not "my" r...

There are a lot of settings evoked in this poem. A "road" is one setting (l. 11). This road is the metaphorical path that African-Americans have walked on their long march to freedom. On a second l...

When we read this poem out loud, we kind of want to sing it. That's not a surprise, of course, given that it was, you know, written to be sung. The poem has such strong rhythms that it pulls us rig...

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" is a title that does a bunch of things at once. First of all, it's a title that calls for collective action: it's asking us, all of us, to lift our voices and sing. So t...

James Weldon Johnson was writing at a time when African-Americans were in the middle of their struggle for freedom. At the turn of the century, when Johnson lived, African-Americans still didn't ha...

This poem isn't very hard, but it's also not a total breeze. For starters, we get a lot of poetic devices like metaphor and simile in the poem. We may not immediately understand what the "stony" ro...

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" is one of the authorized hymnals of the Episcopal Church. (Source.)"Lift Every Voice and Sing" was first performed in 1900 by 500 school children at the Stanton School...

Sorry to disappoint, but we won't find any sex in this poem. It's a song about the struggle for freedom and equal rights. What's sex got to do with it?

"Stony the road we trod" (11): This is a reference to African-Americans' long struggle for freedom. "Bitter the chastening rod" (12): This is a reference to the violence that African-Americans...