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Create a video of yourself reading this poem. After you read it tell me about your favorite line from the poem, and why you liked it.

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Snapinsta - Download Instagram Videos, Reels, Stories for FREE

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Download Instagram videos in high-definition for free with our Instagram video downloader. Easily save videos from posts, reels, and stories. Better experience than Snapinsta.

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Choose several unknown words from the poem that you will add to your vocabulary list. Be sure to find a definition of the word, and to use it in a sentence. For this activity find all the new words in the poem, you must have at least 3 words for this activity to be complete.

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Think about this poem in comparison to the death portrayed in Bridge to Terebithia.

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Read this poem by Robert Frost. Both poems deal with loss, the idea of immortality, and death. Write several comparisons you can make between the two. Think about ways they are similar and ways they are different, how did each poem make you feel?

"Nothing Gold Can Stay"

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

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Draw a picture or choose a picture online that represents the imagery created in your head when you read this poem.

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“When Great Trees Fall"

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

― Maya Angelou

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Read this brief article about some of Maya Angelou's great accomplishments. It also gives some background knowledge about the time period this poem was written. Write a short paragraph about how this article made you think differently about the poem.

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Photo by TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images

What hasn't Maya Angelou done? A poet, memoirist, historian, activist, and professor; a three-time Grammy winner for her spoken-word recordings; a nightclub dancer; a cabaret and calypso singer; a Broadway actress, a film and television director; a performer for Alvin Ailey; the second poet, after Robert Frost, to appear at an American presidential inauguration; an ardent tweeter until the very end -86 years seems too short to contain the boil and glow of her life. But Angelou lived to challenge limits.

Growing up amid sexism and violence, she turned her womanhood into a joyful phenomenon. Witness to the Jim Crow South, she plunged into the civil rights movement with a series of plays and essays on the American black experience. She captured the resilience of the downtrodden with a few immortal lines from her 1978 verse collection: "You may write me down in history/ With your bitter, twisted lies/ You may trod me in the very dirt/ But still, like dust, I'll rise."

The stanza below comes from "When Great Trees Fall," the last poem in Angelou's fifth volume of poetry, I Shall Not Be Moved. It captures her grace and gentleness, as well as that calm stretching action she urges upon us: Fill the spaces and move beyond them. Be and be better. Angelou has filled the spaces and passed through one more limit. We're all the better for it.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

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One of the Most Beautiful Stanzas Maya Angelou Wrote Is About What Happens When Great Souls Die

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What hasn't Maya Angelou done? A poet, memoirist, historian, activist, and professor; a three-time Grammy winner for her spoken-word recordings; a nightclub dancer; a cabaret and calypso singer; a Broadway actress, a film and television director; a performer for Alvin Ailey; the second poet, after Robert Frost, to appear at an American presidential inauguration; an ardent tweeter until the very end -86 years seems too short to contain the boil and glow of her life.