Once again, the pattern of three is deployed to great rhetorical effect: ‘rebuild, reconcile, and recover’. Gorman then refers to the ‘north-east’ of the country where the ‘forefathers’ – the founding fathers of the United States – first made revolution a reality and gained their independence from Britain (with Washington himself, of course, being a key figure in the struggle). More alliteration follows in the closing lines: ‘breath from my bronze-pounded chest’, ‘wounded world’, ‘wondrous one’.Īlthough this is a contemporary poem written in free verse, and there are some similarities between Gorman’s rhythms and alliteration and what we find in rap and hip-hop music, her style also harks back to medieval English alliterative verse and Anglo-Saxon poetry, which was similarly unrhymed but used regular patterns of alliteration. Gorman concludes ‘The Hill We Climb’ by exhorting her audience of fellow Americans to make the country greater than it currently is, so that they leave America better than they found it. It’s possible that, amongst other things, Gorman’s lines here (and her use of the word ‘inaction’, often used in the context of climate change debates) are referring to global environmental issues as well as domestic social, economic, and political ones. This is similar to the argument often made in favour of taking action to combat climate change: our generation needs to act today so that our children’s generation will have a tomorrow.
It is imperative that, for the sake of the generations to come, Americans act now. The confident plosives of ‘benevolent but bold’ and the fierce fricatives of ‘fierce and free’ reflect her resolution and conviction. In the ensuing lines, Gorman talks of the need to march onwards, rather than falling backwards to old ways: the country must progress rather than regress from that dark moment. Although a literary allusion is an indirect reference to something, rather than naming it outright, Gorman’s reference to democracy being ‘periodically delayed’ seems to be a fairly clear nod to the Storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021 – just a few weeks before Gorman recited her poem at Biden’s inauguration.īut democracy cannot be defeated, she tells us.
In the next lines, we get an allusion to recent events in Washington, D. Americans of today need to acknowledge the past (good and bad) which they ‘inherit’, and ‘repair’ what needs improving. This, Gorman tells us, is ‘the hill we climb’. Victory is not to be achieved through violence or war (back to that military oppression), but through building ‘bridges’ of all kinds between Americans, joining society together. This phrase is about being safe and free from military oppression: living a life free from fear.
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