Essay prompts Call Us What We Carry Amanda Gorman

Analytical Essay Prompts for Call Us What We Carry

Use these 12 essay prompts to explore Amanda Gorman's Call Us What We Carry. Each prompt targets a specific literary element—character change, causality, relationships, contrasting scenes, themes, symbols, structure, foreshadowing, or the ending—with a defensible thesis direction and evidence leads drawn from the collection. Internal links connect to related study resources.

1. The Collective Speaker’s Arc: From Disorientation to Agency

Why it matters: The poem’s narrator shifts from a stunned collective to an active agent of change. Tracing this arc reveals how trauma transforms identity.

Sample thesis direction: Across Call Us What We Carry, the collective speaker evolves from passive grief to deliberate self-definition, a change forced by the necessity of carrying history forward.

Evidence leads:

“Ship’s Manifest”: The speaker asks what purpose writing serves amid chaos, framing the collection as a message in a bottle.
&So: The speaker claims “It is easy to harp, / Harder to hope” and asserts that the world’s roundness makes departure into reunion.
“Monomyth”: The pandemic timeline ends without closure, but the speaker insists “we are at least human” and that storytelling passes the world.
“Resolute”: The final resolve “not to stir stones but to make mountains” marks active creation.

2. Language Loss as Cause of New Connection

Why it matters: Gorman treats linguistic erosion as a direct cause of renewed fellowship, not merely a symptom of crisis.

Sample thesis direction: The pandemic’s destruction of shared language in “At First” creates the necessity for a new, communal vocabulary, which Gorman builds through the suffix -ship and the metaphor of the ark.

Evidence leads:

“At First”: Words vanish (“joy”, “together”); survivors use violent phrases like “take a stab.”
“Another Nautical”: The etymology of -ship (“to shape”) becomes a verb meaning to pair people, transforming relationship into action.
“What We Carry”: Language is called an ark, a container that preserves what matters; the speaker concludes “we have learned our true names.”
“Good Grief”: Grief has its own grammar “structured by intimacy and imagination,” offering an alternative to lost ordinary speech.

3. Fellowship Across Time: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Roy Plummer as Models

Why it matters: Gorman brings historical figures into dialogue with the present, creating a relationship that models solidarity across generations.

Sample thesis direction: By interweaving the voices of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Roy Underwood Plummer, Gorman argues that fellowship is a transhistorical practice of protest and record-keeping that sustains communities through crises.

Evidence leads:

“The Fellowship”: Wells-Barnett’s 1918 letter to Wilson protesting segregation in the military; the refrain “Democracy before war.”
“The Soldiers (or Plummer)”: Plummer’s diary entries paired with haiku; the annotation emphasizes his status as a Black soldier serving in segregated troops.
“Pre-memory”: The concept of postmemory han and collective remembrance shows that memory of oppression can be inherited and activated.
“Who We Gonna Call”: “There are no wraiths but us”; the speaker calls on the “tender selves” rather than external ghosts.

4. Contrasting Pandemics: 1918 and 2020

Why it matters: Gorman juxtaposes the 1918 influenza with COVID-19 to reveal patterns of isolation, scapegoating, and care that repeat across history.

Sample thesis direction: The parallel accounts of the 1918 epidemic—Selma Epp’s child witness, the Donohue family’s ledger, the nurse’s letter—expose how official records erase communal loss, while Gorman’s contemporary poems restore that erased humanity.

Evidence leads:

“Selma Epp”: A two-year-old boy dies; the poem includes only one line—“Protest”—as a break.
“Donohue Family Ledgers”: The poem contrasts the orderly “common era” with messy entries; a girl is scribbled as “buried in the trench.”
“Letter from a Nurse”: Written from Haskell Indian Nations University, listing closures and ending with urgent pleas to “write back.”
“Condolence”: A 1918 letter of condolence from the Yakama Indian Agency; the speaker notes the plague has “resumed.”

5. Grief as Constructive Force vs. Destructive Despair

Why it matters: Gorman explicitly redefines grief as a tool for clearing and grounding, but also depicts despair as a ravenous force. Analyzing this tension reveals her argument about survival.

Sample thesis direction: While “The Shallows” presents despair as an “inverted flame” that consumes, “Good Grief” redefines trauma’s piercing as an anchor, showing that the same experience can lead to either paralysis or purposeful transformation.

Evidence leads:

“The Shallows”: “Despair is ravenous and never satisfied”; the poem ends with “grieve, then choose.”
“Good Grief”: Trauma’s etymology (“piercing” or “turning”); grief is an anchor, not a burden; “what we carry means we survive.”
“Surviving”: “It didn’t have to be this way”; the speaker vows to move for the lost and let loss “sing on.”
“Lucent”: Scars are “the brightest parts of us”; the moon is a “lucent lesion.”

6. The Ark as Central Symbol

Why it matters: The ark appears in two key poems and ties together language, memory, and survival. It is the collection’s most sustained symbol.

Sample thesis direction: Gorman transforms the ark from a biblical vessel of preservation into a metaphor for language itself, arguing that words are the container that carries what matters through catastrophe.

Evidence leads:

“What We Carry”: The ark preserves Noah’s family and the Torah scrolls; “We put words in the ark.” Language is “an ark,” “a life raft.”
“Another Nautical”: “Are we not the animals, two by two, / Heavy hearted & hoofed, horned, / Marching into the ark of our lives.”
“Ship’s Manifest”: The book itself is described as a “message in a bottle” and an ark.
“Essex II”: The shipwreck imagery of the Essex contrasts with the ark, showing that some vessels fail.

7. Erasure Poetry as Structural Resistance

Why it matters: Gorman uses found texts and erasure to expose historical silences. The structure of these poems mirrors the act of recovering what has been omitted.

Sample thesis direction: Through erasure poems such as “Donohue Family Ledgers,” “[Ours],” and “The Fellowship,” Gorman demonstrates that removing words from the archive can illuminate what official history has buried, making erasure an act of expansion rather than destruction.

Evidence leads:

“Erasure” (chapter 37): Defines erasure poetry as exposing an undercurrent, “voices exiled from history.”
“Donohue Family Ledgers”: The poem emerges from crossed-out ledger entries; the girl’s identity is reduced to a scribble.
“[Ours]”: Adapts Washington’s language about enslaved people, replacing property terms with commands for “right respect.”
“The Fellowship”: Blends Wells-Barnett’s letter with Gorman’s lines, turning protest into timeless refrain.

8. Foreshadowing in the Epigraph and Opening Poems

Why it matters: The epigraph from Anne Carson introduces the idea of carrying and questioning, which echoes throughout the book. Tracking this foreshadowing shows how Gorman builds thematic coherence.

Sample thesis direction: The epigraph’s claim that survival imposes a responsibility to “carry that experience or transform it into an autonomous object” foreshadows every major move of the collection, from the confessional poems of loss to the archival poems of historical reclamation.

Evidence leads:

Epigraph: Carson traces history from “to ask” to survival; the historian becomes one who inquires and then carries.
“Ship’s Manifest”: The speaker asks “why write” and answers: to render an account of what was meant and felt.
“Please”: The brackets illustrate erasure and the plea for collective preservation, a concrete example of “carrying.”
“Call Us”: Ends with “Call us / What we carry,” directly answering the epigraph’s imperative.

9. The Ending as Spiral: “Closure” and the Final Poems

Why it matters: The collection resists a linear happy ending. Instead, the final poems redefine closure as a spiral and emphasize carrying the world forward.

Sample thesis direction: By concluding with “Closure,” “What We Carry,” and “The Hill We Climb,” Gorman argues that resolution is not an endpoint but a continual process of return and revision, where “beginning again” means choosing connection over finality.

Evidence leads:

“Closure”: “Closure is a spiral, not a circle.” The poem ends: “What are we to each other if not everything.”
“What We Carry”: The speaker walks into “tomorrow, / Carrying nothing / But the world.” The ark metaphor concludes with open hands.
“The Unordinary World”: “Identity is what we make from dark.”
“The Hill We Climb”: The final line: “There is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. / If only we’re brave enough to be it.”

10. The Microbiome as Collective Identity

Why it matters: Gorman uses the biological concept of the microbiome to dissolve the boundary between self and other, arguing that identity is ecological.

Sample thesis direction: In “Call Us,” the claim that “We are not me—We are we” rooted in the microbiome redefines individuality as inter-species cohabitation, a foundation for the fellowship poems that reject oppositional unity.

Evidence leads:

“Call Us”: “At times over half of our bodies / Are not our own”; the body is a boat, country, planet for microbes.
“Another Nautical”: “There truly is a unity / That requires no ‘they’ / For us to be threatened by.”
“Arborescent I” and “Arborescent III”: Tree metaphors emphasize hidden roots and communal growth.
“Earth Eyes”: The earth archives all human history without judgment, reinforcing a planetary identity.

11. Historical Cycles: The Capitol Riot and Red Summer

Why it matters: Gorman directly links the January 6 insurrection to the 1919 Red Summer, arguing that political violence repeats when memory fails.

Sample thesis direction: By juxtaposing the 2021 Capitol attack with James Weldon Johnson’s account of 1919 racial violence in “DC Putsch,” Gorman exposes a cycle of white-supremacist attacks on democracy and calls for honest investigation as the only way to break it.

Evidence leads:

“DC Putsch”: Labels the January 6 attack a coup; references Johnson’s Crisis article on the Red Summer.
“The Truth in One Nation”: “One nation under guns” and “under desks” critiques routine police violence.
“Fury & Faith”: White supremacy is a disease; rage is reclaimed as a right that signals the time to fight.
“Roses”: Subverts the nursery rhyme: “Riots are red / Violence is blue / We’re sick of dying / How ’bout you.”

12. Hope as a Practice, Not a Possession

Why it matters: Gorman distinguishes hope from optimism and treats hope as a deliberate craft. This distinction is central to the collection’s ethic of resilience.

Sample thesis direction: Across “Every Day We Are Learning,” “Practice Makes People,” and “Arborescent III, or Elpis,” Gorman argues that hope is not a passive emotion but an active practice that must be “craft[ed]” and “fought for” through daily intention.

Evidence leads:

“Every Day We Are Learning”: “Hope must be practiced, not passively possessed”; it is the “most fundamental craft.”
“Practice Makes People”: “Fate isn’t fought / Against. It is fought for. / Again & again.” The vaccine is a “pain we asked for.”
“Arborescent III, or Elpis”: “Hope needs no reason—hope is its own purpose.” The final word is “Change.”
“& So”: “It is easy to harp, / Harder to hope” frames hoping as a difficult choice.