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“Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James Weldon Johnson is a hymn and an anthem addressed to Black Americans during the difficult years of Post-Reconstruction. Johnson relies on the first-person-plural point of view, varying diction and imagery to encourage listeners to be active and steadfast participants in the struggle to secure their freedom.
In the first stanza, Johnson relies on diction and imagery to reframe how the speaker and audience see Black history during the present, difficult moment of the poem. Through word choices like “Lift” (Line 1), “heaven” (Line 2), “rise” (Line 3), and “High” (Line 5), Johnson creates a mood of upward momentum and optimism. Many of the lines in this first stanza are designed to get the audience to see itself as capable of action. “Lift” (Line 1), “Let” (Lines 4, 6, and 10), “Sing” (Lines 7 and 8) are imperatives—verbs that command—that are all about action by the speaker and their audience.
In the first stanza, Johnson also uses visual and auditory imagery that encourages the audience to see the present moment as a victorious one. The speaker acknowledges but does not yet dwell on the “dark past” (Line 7) of enslavement and racial terror after Reconstruction. Instead, the speaker focuses on “the present” (Line 8), when the audience members are strong because they are united, even if it is just for the duration of the poem. Johnson uses the visual image of “the rising sun” (Line 9) to show that the future has the potential to be something even greater than this present—“victory” (Line 10) over racism and prejudice. Johnson’s imagery and word choices in the first stanza make “Lift Every Voice and Sing” an anthem that shores up an imagined nation of Black Americans, a people who are united by a common past and a common hope.
In the second stanza, there is a marked shift in mood. Instead of images of the heavens, there are images of earthly troubles, including a “Stony” road (Line 11). The lines in this stanza are more past-facing, and that past is one of violence and disappointment. The expectation of freedom is figuratively a failed delivery—“hope unborn” (Line 13)—and death, which covers that road with “the blood of the slaughtered” (Line 18). Words such as “Bitter” (Line 12) and “gloomy” (Line 19) are admissions that the good present and glorious future come at great cost. Then the mood shifts again, as the bright sun of Line 9 in the first stanza becomes a lesser light—a “white gleam” (Line 21) that represents “now” (Line 20). The more somber mood of the second stanza shows that the speaker is able to see the present in a way that acknowledges the reality of struggle for Black Americans.
The “Stony road” (Line 11) and “chast’ning rod” (Line 12) at the start of the second stanza are conventional images from the Bible, an important storehouse of references that Black Americans used to represent struggle and hope. These lines anticipate the more overtly Christian imagery of the third stanza. The third stanza is a direct appeal to both God and the audience, which must continue to trust in God despite the struggles of the past and present. Although there have been “weary years” (Line 22) and “silent tears” (Line 23), the speaker credits Christian faith with allowing Black Americans to come through the difficult times. Johnson returns to Biblical imagery of darkness and light, with the “light” in Line 26 representing God’s intervention as the reason for Black survival.
The third stanza further contrasts a godly perspective and a more worldly perspective on what the present moment calls for. In the Bible, drunkenness is an impediment to one’s relationship with God. It is also a loss of the moral sense that allows a person to distinguish between right and wrong. For Black Americans who make up the audience for the poem, getting “drunk with the wine of the world” (Line 29) is a failure to maintain a single-minded focus on freedom. Drunkenness may also mean a retreat from the racial unity that comes with staying on the path with others who are engaged in the pursuit of freedom.
The poem ends with a turn that is typical of hymns and anthems. Johnson uses parallel grammatical structure in Lines 32 and 33 to emphasize the link between faith and freedom. If Black Americans wish to be free, they have to keep faith with both God and the more earthly “native land” (Line 33). The underlying assumption in these lines and throughout the poem is that Black Americans have a claim on the United States because there is evidence of providence in their survival of enslavement and racial terror. In the ideal world Johnson imagines, there is nothing more typical of the United States and its Black citizens than a love of “Liberty” (Line 3).
By James Weldon Johnson
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