America

“America” is a poem about the importance of freedom and the nature of American identity as a new and industrious nation deserving of respect. Throughout the poem, the speaker both depicts British injustices against its colony and argues for the importance of reconciliation in order to avoid greater rebellion.

The speaker celebrates the achievement of the British colonists who wrestled this New England colony from the forbidding wilderness they first encountered more than a century earlier. They gained that achievement by the relentless displacement and disenfranchisement of “the savage monsters” (Line 3) they met when they landed. It was the freedom of the Americas that empowered the earliest settlers: “Thy Power, O Liberty, makes strong the weak” (Line 5). In invoking the power of "Liberty” and crediting it as the new nation’s source of strength, the speaker immediately draws a direct association between freedom and the essence of the American experiment.

Lines 8-29 deliver the heart of the poet’s argument, using the metaphorical representation of “Britannia” (England) as an unjust mother who is abusing her son (America). The speaker portrays harsh mother England as laying oppressive taxes on her colonies, an action motivated by how she “Fear[ed] his Strength” (Line 10), as though uneasy at the idea that America could become a rival or threat to her own standing.