Communication II - Analysis

A conversation where the speakers never quite meet

Communication II stages a painful mismatch between two kinds of distance: the student’s distance from history and the teacher’s distance from hope. By splitting the poem into The Student and The Teacher, Angelou makes the gap feel like a dialogue that cannot happen in real time. The student stands untouched by inheritance, while the teacher is almost buried under it. The poem’s central claim is stark: when historical knowledge is cut off from the young, it doesn’t disappear—it reappears as exhaustion in the one tasked with carrying it.

The tone in the student section is cool and diagnostic, as if the poem is taking a reading of what has (and hasn’t) marked him. The teacher section turns heavier, more haunted, as if history is not a subject but an acoustics that keeps sounding.

The student’s untouched face, and the cost of being beyond

The first image is physical: dust of ancient pages that has never touched his face. Knowledge is imagined as something that should leave residue—something that should smudge you, slightly, with age and contact. Instead, the student is clean. The poem doesn’t call him cruel or lazy; it calls him young un-knowing, a phrase that feels both tender and troubling. The hyphen turns ignorance into a condition—almost a protected enclosure.

Even the word beyond, isolated on its own line, matters as a moral distance. These things—books, histories, meanings—are not merely unknown; they are placed out of reach, sealed away somewhere past his daily life.

Black beauty sealed into a museum of the mind

The most striking image in the student stanza is also the most ambiguous: fountains black and comely that were mummied in a place. A fountain should move; it should spill and sing. Here it is preserved, embalmed, stopped. Black and comely suggests beauty and Blackness together, but the poem refuses to let that beauty flow into the student’s present. It is stored like an artifact, turned into something admired from a distance rather than lived and understood.

That creates a key tension: the student’s innocence is described almost gently, yet what he is innocent of includes living cultural force—something that should be active like water, not inert like a mummy.

The teacher’s knowledge as echo-chamber and burden

Where the student is defined by what has not touched him, the teacher is defined by what she has taken in. She shared the lettered strivings not only of books but of etched Pharaonic walls—writing carved into stone, history that has survived by being cut deep. The phrase makes education feel like archaeology: to learn is to read what has been forced to endure.

Then the poem abruptly relocates to the United States with Reconstruction’s anguish, a phrase that compresses a whole era into a single emotion. Importantly, that anguish doesn’t remain in the past; it resounded down the halls. History becomes sound—reverberation—inside an institution, something you can’t shut out once you’re inside it.

Dry dreams: when teaching becomes a kind of thirst

The teacher’s ending is devastating: those halls echo through all her dry dreams. After the student’s mummied fountain, the teacher’s dryness reads like the emotional consequence of being the only one expected to keep water alive. The poem sets up a contradiction between what learning promises and what it delivers here: education should open futures, yet for the teacher it has calcified into dream-life without moisture—aspiration without nourishment.

That dryness also answers the student’s clean face. If the student has been kept from dust, the teacher has been given too much dust, too much stone, too much echo—so much past that it leaches the wetness from her imagination.

A sharper question the poem won’t let us avoid

If the student is young un-knowing and the teacher is trapped in dry dreams, then what exactly has failed—one person’s attention, or the whole system that decides what is beyond whom? The poem’s quiet accusation is that ignorance is not merely personal; it is arranged, like a museum display where the black and comely is preserved but not released.

What Communication means here

The title promises exchange, but the poem shows parallel monologues: a student sealed off from inherited text, and a teacher saturated with it. Angelou’s final effect is not to blame either speaker as a character, but to show how a severed line of cultural memory turns knowledge into two distortions at once—emptiness on one side, desiccation on the other. In that sense, the poem suggests that true communication would be neither mummification nor echo, but something like the fountain restored: history made to move again.