A Good Woman Feeling Bad - Analysis

The blues as a predator, not a mood

This poem insists that sadness is not merely a feeling but a force with agency—something that hunts, corners, and disciplines the speaker. Angelou starts with explanations that sound almost reasonable: The blues may be the result of midnight hours in An empty bed, the kind of loneliness a reader can file under ordinary heartbreak. But the speaker immediately corrects that softness by naming persecuting blues, the kind she has known. The word persecuting changes everything: the blues aren’t just present; they pursue.

The tone, then, is both conversational and stark. She sounds like someone trying to speak plainly about pain, but what she describes keeps intensifying past plainness. That tension—between the familiar label blues and the extreme violence of its images—drives the poem’s emotional power.

Tigers, bone, and the body as evidence

Angelou’s first major image makes the blues animal and physical: they can stalk / Like tigers and break like bone. A tiger suggests stealth and inevitability; you don’t argue a tiger out of wanting you. And break like bone turns sadness into injury, implying that what’s harmed is structural—your inner frame. These are not metaphors for being a little low. They describe being damaged in ways you can’t hide.

There’s a grim logic to the progression: stalking is fear before contact; breaking is impact. The poem makes the reader feel the speaker’s dread and then the blow, compressing a whole cycle of suffering into a few lines.

Rope and pedigree: the blues as inherited punishment

The blues then become a weapon of social execution: they can Pend like rope in A gallows tree. That image carries a public, historical weight—death not as a private tragedy but as something performed by a system. Immediately after, the speaker says the blues can Make me curse / My pedigree. The pairing suggests a brutal contradiction: what should anchor identity—family line, origin, belonging—becomes something the speaker wants to reject.

This is one of the poem’s sharpest tensions: the speaker doesn’t only suffer; she is pressured to turn against herself. The blues aren’t just pain; they are a force that tries to rewrite loyalty, making her spit back at her own roots.

The mouth that can’t sing: bitterness as blocked prayer

After the gallows, the poem shifts inward, into the mouth. Bitterness thick sits on a rankling tongue, as if language itself has been coated and spoiled. Then comes a startling phrase: A psalm to love that’s Left unsung. A psalm is meant to be voiced; it’s praise made audible. By calling love’s song a psalm and then keeping it unsung, the poem frames the speaker’s sadness as spiritual deprivation—not only the loss of love, but the loss of the ability to testify to it.

The tone here is not sentimental; it’s restrained and bitterly lucid. The speaker recognizes what love should have been—something singable, something like prayer—and recognizes the silence where it ought to be.

Northbound rivers, southern endings, and a funeral mouth

The poem’s images widen again, from the tongue to geography. Rivers heading north but ending South evokes a life that tries to move toward freedom or relief and is dragged back to an older gravity. It’s a riddle-like picture of reversal: the direction of hope doesn’t guarantee the destination. Then the poem collapses that large motion back into the body with Funeral music in a going-home mouth. The phrase going-home can carry comfort—return, rest, even salvation—but it’s filled with funeral sound. Home is promised, yet the sound arriving is mourning.

This is the poem’s quiet turn: the blues are no longer only predator or punishment; they become a kind of music lodged in the speaker, turning even the language of return into a dirge.

All riddles are blues: the poem’s bleak generosity

In the final lines, Angelou offers a bleak thesis: All riddles are blues, and all blues are sad. A riddle is a question you can’t quite solve; the poem suggests that unsolvedness itself is a form of sorrow. Yet the ending also shows a controlled modesty: I’m only mentioning Some blues I’ve had. After tigers, bones, ropes, gallows, and funerals, the speaker calls this merely some. That understatement does two things at once: it hints at a larger history of hurt, and it shows the speaker’s composure—the ability to name pain without letting it take over the whole page.

The poem’s central claim is that the blues are not a single story but a whole ecology of suffering—loneliness, inheritance, blocked love, reversed journeys—each one a riddle whose answer is simply that it hurts, and it keeps hurting.