18 pages • 36 minutes read
Amanda GormanThe Miracle of Morning
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Puns
Gorman often uses puns in her poetry, and “The Miracle of Morning” is no different. The opening stanza plays on the words “mourning” and “morning,” contrasting the difference between the darkness of mourning and the light of morning. In stanza four, Gorman again puns morning and mourning, but this time she shortens the words to mourn and morn, giving the pun more variety even though the meaning of the pun remains the same. In the final stanza, Gorman also puns humankind and “humans kind” (Line 31).
The punning here allows the poem an easy rhyme and rhythm, but it also has a rhetorical strength. Her three puns are in three strategic places. The first pun opens the poem, the second pun is in the shortest stanza that features the poem’s strongest metaphor, and the final pun comes at the end of the poem. The placing of these puns in these places further emphasizes the themes Gorman expresses throughout the poem.
Alliteration, Consonance, and Assonance
While Gorman’s uses puns sparingly, the repetition of the sounds of individual letters through the of alliteration, consonance, and assonance is everywhere, lending a musical quality to the poem. The poem’s title gives the first indication of this repetition of sound, setting the stage for the rest of the stanzas in the poem.
The first line repeats i (I, I’d, in) sounds and w (awaken, world) sounds, and it sets up the repetition of m (mourning) sounds to come. The m sounds come quickly: storming, something, morning, something, magical, warming. Line two alliterates clouds/crowding and society/storming. And lines three and four work together with something/something/sunlight, something/morning/something/magical/warming, and wide/warming.
While this kind of breakdown would be appropriate for every stanza, one particular stanza that stands out is stanza five.
In this stanza, Gorman repeats unique sounds, including h sounds with healthcare/heroes/hospitals/hit/hardest and d sounds with defeat/despair/disease. While repeating these strong sounds, she also continues the repetition of w with mostly linking words: we/will/we/with/with/waiters.
Gorman’s poetry always features heavy repetition of letter sounds, which reflects the poet’s commitment and experience with spoken word poetry. The emphasis on the sounds of the poem lend a rhythmic and musical quality to her poetry.
Rhyme and Rhythm
“The Miracle of Morning” does not follow a set rhyme scheme or metrical pattern, though there are varying patterns of both throughout. The poem features a number of iambs, and most of the lines feature about four or five stressed syllables, though this does vary. The rhyme scheme depends on the stanza, but most of the stanzas follow an AABB format. For a spoken word poem like this, the rhythmic emphasis comes more from the reader than from the words themselves, as the poet can choose when and where to pause, where to emphasize, and at what pace to read lines. When trying to decipher the rhythm Gorman intends, the best strategy is to listen to her read the poem and scan it according to her reading.
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By Amanda Gorman
