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.
Background
Socio-Historical Context
“The Miracle of Morning” is a poem that responds directly to the COVID-19 global pandemic that began in late 2019. The coronavirus pandemic began in Wuhan, China, and it quickly spread to affect the entire world. The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, became the worst global pandemic since the Spanish Flu pandemic at the beginning of the 20th century. As of 2022, more than 5 million people have died from the pandemic and over 285 million people have been infected.
Gorman wrote the poem early in the pandemic when governments all over the world ordered lockdowns in order to enforce social distancing rules and limit the spread of the disease. In America, both the impact of the lockdowns and the impact of the many deaths due to the virus reshaped the country, leading to political division and unrest, social anxiety, and economic distress. However, the pandemic also led to an outpouring of support from many communities for people working in essential fields like healthcare and food services. The pandemic caused an unprecedented amount of social stress and collective grief in American society. As the death toll from the virus rose and with no end to the pandemic in sight, the number of Americans experiencing mental health issues rose and many people seemed to lose hope.
Many people experienced an emotional mix of grief and unity, which led to a unique social situation in many parts of the world in which individuals felt both disconnected and connected at the same time. The pandemic was a time when everyone had to endure the same limitations on their social interactions and sense of safety, but everyone was experiencing these limitations in their own way, making for unique reactions to a widely experienced situation. As the pandemic continued, the contradicting feelings of connection and separation intensified, drastically changing society in ways that we are yet to understand fully.
Literary Context
Poems of loss and comfort have a long history. An elegy is a poem that laments someone who has died, and while Gorman’s poem contains characteristics of an elegy, it is broader in scope and deals more with collective loss and grief than the personal crisis of losing a loved one. Unlike an elegy that typically embraces the negative emotions like sadness and grief associated with loss, Gorman’s poem is forward-thinking and acknowledges a sense of loss in order to name its potential to unite people. In this sense, the poem echoes a historical example like Pericles’s “Funeral Oration,” where Pericles uses the deaths of his countrymen to rally the living to press on and unite. While Gorman’s poem does not deal with a literal war, it does focus on the national struggle against a virulent disease in order to bring together a devastated population under a banner of hope and national unity.
Elegiac poems often offer readers encouragement to accept the death and the feeling of loss while simultaneously looking to the future. In this way, Gorman’s poem fits the definition of an elegy even though it is not about a single person or about a group of people. In fact, the poem rejects one aspect of the elegy tradition by resisting a focus on the lamentation of the dead; instead of lamenting the past and those we have lost, the poem focuses exclusively on the future and the living.
Related Titles
By Amanda Gorman
