On the Pulse of Morning Literary Elements

The speaker is a fluid, urgent presence who incorporates the voices of natural bodies including the rock, river, and tree.

Free verse with no standard meter or rhyme pattern.

In the line "Across the wall of the world," the wall is a metaphor for physical and cultural divides. In the line "Each of you, a bordered country," countries are a metaphor for individualism and isolation. In the line "Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your/Brow," cynicism is metaphorically represented as a wound.

Angelou uses frequent alliteration in this work. Alliterative R sounds appear in “Rock, the River, the Tree, your country," while alliterative M sounds appear directly afterward, in "No less to Midas than the mendicant./No less to you now than the mastodon then." Alliterative S sounds appear in "Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare." Assonant short E sounds appear in "Do not be wedded forever."

The poem is generally unironic and sincere, but Angelou does argue, with a kind of historical irony, that the future can only be created by paying attention to the past.

Inaugural poem; lyric poem

America, evoked obliquely rather than directly

Contemplative, urgent, hopeful

The protagonists are nature and humanity alike, while the antagonists are cynicism and brutality

The primary conflict is between the mistakes of the past and the promise of the future.

The poem reaches its conflict when the speaker urges listeners to give birth to a dream.

The imagery of the mastodon going extinct because it ignored or failed to comprehend warning signs of its own doom foreshadows the potential fate of humanity if people do the same.

The poem's allusions to war and slavery are understated and tale-like, conveyed in language like "Your armed struggles for profit" and "arriving on the nightmare / Praying for a dream."

The poem alludes to the Greek myth of King Midas, to prehistoric animals, and to America history, including the indigenous Pawnee, Apache, Cherokee, and Seneca people, and the Ashe, Yoruba, and Kru people transported as slaves.

The rock, river, and tree are all used as synecdoche to represent the natural world as a whole.

Personification is constantly in play here, with natural entities like the river, rock, and tree possessing voices and desires of their own.

Angelou mentions a huge swath of demographic and cultural groups, hyperbolically bringing every individual and type into the poem's vision of the future.

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