I Learned I Was A Phenomenal Woman

I Learned I was a Phenomenal Woman

Marguerite Johnson later known as Maya Angelou was born on April 4th, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Marguerite Johnson was raised in St. Louis, Missouri as well as Stamps, Arkansas. According to her website, Stamps at the time that she was raised, was the frontier of the South during the 1930s and 1940s when Johnson was growing up, Stamps ran rampant with racial discrimination and physical brutality. Her grandmother from age 4 years old to 8 years old raised Marguerite. Johnson came to live with her grandmother after her parents rocky marriage ended with a divorce. Her time with her grandmother was seen as a good part of her life but when her father came back into her life, everything that once was fine …show more content…
Phenomenal Woman does not have allusion to it. The poem solely talks about a woman who decides what makes her beautiful in a world that denies her beauty. She challenges the standards and men are in awe of her for that. Denotations and connotations thrive throughout the poem (lines 1,6, 8, and 12). Words within the poem such as pretty, phenomenal, fall, fire etc. can be looked up in a dictionary and be defined. Other words in the poem can be seen with underlying messages such as the usage of the word joy. In the poem, the line reads “And the joy in my feet.”(line 8), joy within the line has more than one meaning, which directly relates this line and others to connotation. The level of diction is slangy compared to formal. The speaker of the poem is sassy and oozes confidence with every description of what makes her a woman. The poem does not seem to use word play. The chapter talks about syntax. The syntax of this poem was easy to follow due to the word usage and the independent clauses. For example, the line that reads “The span of my hips. The stride of my step, The curl of my lips” (line 3) is a perfect example and one of many provided within the poem. Syntax sometimes allows poems to leave out words but this poem left no word out which allowed for a flowing read through and through. There seems to be no usage of …show more content…
We can clearly tell it is a woman due the detailed descriptions. As well as the repetition of the word woman which emphasizes the gender of the speaker. The speaker would be characterized as ambitious and concise. She is speaking to women who have felt lesser because they do not fit society standards of what is beautiful. She is telling women that the little things that make you different are what make you beautiful. The speaker is speaking because she feels the need to tell women all over that you do not need to be like or look like the women a large majority of society favors. The situation that is described in the poem is about a woman who overcame negativity to become some who extremely comfortable in her skin. Phenomenal Woman does not have any usage of rhetorical figures of speech. There was usage of similes. As we see in the line, “It’s the fire in my eyes” (line 8). The line “The fellows stand or Fall down on their knees. Then they swarm around me, A hive of honey bees” (lines 6 and 7) shows that there is usage of metaphors. There does not seem to be any usage of personification. As well as no usage of extended metaphors. The poem does have great usage of imagery. Due to imagery being broken down into sections, the poem uses descriptive imagery as well as figurative. The poem does not have any kind of symbolism but does flow efficiently which is correlated to