What the exam asks
In Paper 2 (1 hour 45 minutes, 25 marks), you write a closed-book comparative essay on two literary works. When using Maya Angelou’s poems as one of your works, it is good practice to discuss more than one poem from your selection to show knowledge of the whole work (Criterion A, 5 marks). To reach the top bands in Criterion B1 (analysis and evaluation of textual features and/or authorial choices, 5 marks) and Criterion B2 (comparative analysis, 5 marks), you must move beyond summarising Angelou’s message of peace and evaluate how her structural choices—such as suspending the grammatical resolution across eleven stanzas—shape the reader’s experience.
In the individual oral (15 minutes, 40 marks), you may select a continuous extract of up to 40 lines from this poem (such as stanzas 6 to 11) to explore a global issue concerning war, peacemaking, or human rights, linking the extract’s micro-choices to the wider work.
Core ideas
Occasion, form, and the collective ‘We’
Delivered in June 1995 for the United Nations’ fiftieth anniversary (and later published by Random House and collected in Celebrations: Rituals of Peace and Prayer, 2006), this was what the scholar Richard Long called Angelou’s second public poem, following her 1993 inaugural poem ‘On the Pulse of Morning’. A recording of it was even carried into space on the first test flight of the Orion spacecraft in 2014.
Written in free verse across eleven stanzas of five to eleven lines (about 78 lines), the poem speaks entirely in the first-person plural. There is no singular ‘I’. The repeated phrase “We, this people” (an appositive: “this people” renames “We”) echoes the opening words of both the United Nations Charter and the United States Constitution, yet the demonstrative “this” makes the species look strange and specific, as if observed from outside.
| Feature | ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ (1993) | ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’ (1995) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary address | Second-person “you”, spoken by the Rock, the River, and the Tree to humanity | Inclusive first-person plural “We, this people” throughout |
| Speaker’s position | Nature standing above and instructing human history | Humanity speaking from inside its own frailty and contradiction |
| Structural engine | Triadic voices leading to a morning summons | Conditional/temporal “When we come to it” clauses deferring the main clause until the final stanza |
Deferred syntax: the ‘When we come to it’ refrain
Seven of the eleven stanzas open with the refrain “When we come to it” (the second stanza varies this slightly as “And when we come to it”). Grammatically, “When” introduces a temporal subordinate clause—a condition waiting for a main clause to complete the thought. By stacking stanza after stanza of “When” clauses before arriving at “Then we will confess” in stanza 6 and the final revelation in stanza 11, Angelou makes the syntax itself enact the long, unfinished labour of peacemaking. The day of peace is structurally held at arm’s length: the reader feels how much human habit must be dismantled before the sentence—and history—can reach its resolution.