Angelou Poem Questions

1) In stanza one, Maya says three things about the mastodons and the dinosaurs. The first thing she talks about was the mastodons being long departed. By saying this she is implying that they are extinct. The second thing she states was that the dinosaurs left behind dry tokens of their sojourn. By this she means that the creatures before us, the dinosaurs and mastodons left us very little information about their journey through life on earth. The last thing she says about them was that they were lost in the gloom and dust of ages, which is saying that we know they were here and we know they perished, we just don’t know what happened to them. Her point is that we don’t want to leave that kind of history behind. We don’t want to leave the future civilizations guessing at how we lived. We want to try and leave some of our culture behind if we do happen to perish as well.
2) America is symbolized by dinosaurs and mastodons. These creatures symbolize America because they were once the most powerful animals of their time, much like our country today. She uses them to symbolize our country because she’s trying to say that we don’t want to follow them in the way that they left the earth, by leaving nothing of value for future generations. She is trying to say we don’t want to leave worthless stuff behind. In the second stanza Maya talks about alarms, these could refer to several things including our economy, war, terrorism, greed, crime and much more. These alarms are what will lead our country to devastation. These are not the things that we want our people to be remembered by in five or ten thousand years from now. We want to be known for our contributions to society. Contributions such as democracy, freedom, and that we were the country that ended racism.
3) The rock represents the foundation of America. For a good foundation we can support ourselves with things like freedom. Something very settle, but it speaks volumes about our country. Other things that we can