The Hill We Climb: Motifs

Light versus Shadow

The speaker uses imagery related to the dawn to introduce a tension between light and shadow. When the speaker begins, she seems doubtful that the new day will in fact bring light (lines 1–3):

When day comes, we ask ourselves:
Where can we find light
In this never-ending shade?

The speaker laments that the collective “we” have been living in conditions of “never-ending shade.” If this shade is indeed never-ending, then how will it be possible to “find light” when the new day arrives? This paradigm of shadow and light relates symbolically to the speaker’s concerns about the nation’s relation to its troubled past. The United States remains within the long shadow cast by slavery and the foundational violence of colonial settlement. Crucially, these are not simply historical events; they continue to shape the present divisions in American society. As such, in order for the nation to step out of the shadow of its past and into a brighter future, these divisions must be bridged and the longstanding wounds healed. To imagine this shift, the speaker invokes an abstract landscape defined by a valley, a hill, and a glade. She insists that “we” must trudge up the hill, leaving the shadowed valley behind and ascending to the glade, where we can witness the new dawn light (lines 93–98):

When day comes, we step out of the shade,
Aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it,
For there is always light,
If only we’re brave enough to see it,
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

References to Ascent

A key motif in Gorman’s poem emerges from the repeated references to ascent. This motif of ascent is already present in the poem’s title, which references a hill. Notably, according to the grammar of the title, we—both the speaker and her audience—are already climbing the hill. Though we have not yet reached the top, we are currently engaged in the act of ascent. For the speaker, this symbolic ascent relates to the ongoing work of improving the nation. Resolving social tensions and healing the wounds of the past become, figuratively, an uphill battle (lines 46–49):

That is the promised glade,
The hill we climb, if only we dare it:
Because being American is more than a pride we inherit—
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.

If “we” do indeed “dare” to climb this hill, then we will reach the open “glade” that offers an elevated view. The speaker returns to this motif of ascent later in the poem, when she presents a rousing litany of ways that we the people will “rise” (lines 82–87):

With every breath from our bronze-pounded chests,
We will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.
We will rise from the gold-limned hills of the West!
We will rise from the windswept Northeast, where our forefathers first realized revolution!
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states!
We will rise from the sunbaked South!

The repetition of the phrase “we will rise” drives home the motif of ascent by invoking a vision of collective uplift. Significantly, this phrase is also an allusion to Maya Angelou’s Black feminist credo in her poem, “Still I Rise.”