Poems
Poem 2: 'Life Doesn't Frighten Me'
Extract
Shadows on the wall
Noises down the hall
Life doesn't frighten me at all
Bad dogs barking loud
Big ghosts in a cloud
Life doesn’t frighten me at all.
The Poet: Maya Angelou (1928-)
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St Louis, Missouri, USA in 1928. She grew up in San Francisco, where she became the first black female streetcar conductor in that city. She had many difficult times in her early life. She worked as a cook and a waitress before embarking on a career as a singer, dancer and theatre and film actress in the 1950s. She became closely involved in the struggle for black civil rights in America led by Martin Luther King, and was a prominent activist, teacher and writer in that cause. She has been very successful as a writer of poetry and prose, and her series of autobiographical novels, beginning with I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (1970) are modern classics. Her best-known poetry collection is And Still I Rise (Virago, 1986). A useful biography of her life and work is Maya Angelou - Genius (Silver Burdette Press, 1990).
The Poem
'Life Doesn't Frighten Me' is a simple but powerful poem, rather like a chant or mantra, that has its roots in the lyrics and sentiments of black American musical forms like gospel and blues. The poem needs to be spoken. Its intention is much the same as that of a child whistling in the dark - to keep up the spirits in times of trouble.
We all seem to become children again when we are scared or facing difficulty, so it seems appropriate that the poem uses images from nursery rhymes - 'Mean old Mother Goose / Lions on the loose' - and childhood experience - 'That new classroom where / Boys all pull my hair'. The poem has no set structure, but the repeated refrain - 'Life doesn't frighten me at all' - acts like a simple song chorus, like the call and response of a worksong. In the section which begins - 'I go boo / Make them shoo' - the shorter lines make for choppier rhythms, breaking up the poem like the 'middle eight' of a pop song.
What Henry Newbolt's poem 'Vitaï Lampada' does for a public group audience, 'Life Doesn't Frighten Me' does for an individual reader. Perhaps one way a poem can succeed is for its readers to recognise and approve of the poet's intention, and take the poet's words and images as their own.
What Carleen Anderson Said
'You can read a poem or hear a song and you think that someone must know you. Have they been in my life? Are they watching me through the window? They say and feel exactly what you're feeling, they put it into words as though you'd written it down yourself.
'The way that she phrases her words, they come off like a song. You just don't hear the sounds to them. You don't hear the drumbeats or the bass and the keyboards and the guitars and so on but you hear some kind of music in the words themselves.
'When you get to that point where you're saying - "I can walk the ocean floor / And never have to breathe" - you're hitting rock bottom at that point anyway... she's really trying to convince herself, as we all have to sometimes, that you can do this, that you can get through this.'
Carleen Anderson - Passwords 1998
