Student Question
Compare the poems "I, Too" and Audre Lorde's "A Litany for Survival." How are they similar and different?
Quick answer:
“I, Too” by Langston Hughes and “A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde both reflect on the inferior status of African American people. While Hughes tends toward optimism and confidence that the situation will improve, Lorde takes a more meditative, pessimistic, and melancholic stance, choosing to focus on fear.
Both “I, Too” by Langston Hughes and “A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde reflect on the inferior position of African Americans in society. Hughes uses the image of being sent “to eat in the kitchen / When company comes” (lines 3–4). He suggests that someone thinks he is not good enough to eat with everyone else. Lorde also uses the image of doorways. African Americans are never quite inside, yet they are always longing to go through the door. They are stuck in the “hours between dawns,” not quite dark and not quite light (line 7). Lord also presents the image of eating, but she refers to putting “bread in [their] children's mouths” and giving them a better future (line 12). Both poets recognize the tenuous-at-best status of their people and the struggle for an equality they do not yet possess.
Hughes, however, is more optimistic than...
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Lorde. “Tomorrow,” he says, “I'll be at the table / When company comes” (lines 8–10). Things will get better. The lives of African Americans will improve. They will be treated as equals. Tomorrow, the poet continues, others will “see how beautiful [he is] / And be ashamed” (lines 16–17). People will recognize the beauty and talent of African Americans and regret that they ever relegated them to the status of second-class citizens.
Lorde, on the other hand, remains rather pessimistic, although she is also more reflective than Hughes. She focuses on fear. Some people, she says, have learned fear from infancy, and even when things seem safe or hopeful, that fear can quickly seize and silence them, convincing them that “[they] were never meant to survive” (line 24). That fear prevails at all times, Lorde reveals in the third stanza:
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning. (lines 25–28)
No matter what the situation, full or hungry, loved or alone, speaking or silent, “[they] are still afraid” (line 41). The poem ends on a melancholic note, “we were never meant to survive” (line 44), as opposed to Hughes’s confident and triumphant “I, too, am America” (line 18).
Indeed, while these two poems both meditate on the status of African American people, they do so in very different ways.