For Lorde, poetry and poet are one, because our language and our voice defines who we are. Auden had described poetry as nevertheless something which ‘survives’ as a ‘way of happening’. Yeats’, the poem in which he had expressed the opinion that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, W. But they have done so.Ĭuriously, in his ‘ In Memory of W. But it is used in the negative form: Lorde reminds us that she, and people like her, were never intended to survive. This word almost stands at odds with ‘afraid’, arguing as it does for an ability to outlive the fear, and the various oppressions which are the source of that fear. This ends not just lines but whole stanzas: specifically, it is the last word of both the second and fourth stanza. The other word which Lorde repeats the ends of lines in ‘A Litany for Survival’ is ‘survive’ itself. Quite the opposite: fear engendered by the realisation that you have nothing to lose can, paradoxically, be empowering. And this obviously makes the rousing final stanza – brief and concise as it is – all the more potent, since Lorde argues that being afraid is no reason not to speak out and use one’s voice to bring about change.
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