Anthology Part 2 poems: The Bright Lights of Sarajevo and Still I Rise

Context: written in 1995 during the siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian War, when the city was surrounded and shelled for years.
Content: the poem opens with the daily hardships of the siege, such as queuing for bread and carrying water home under the threat of snipers and shells. At night, young people stroll through the unlit streets, where in the dark nobody can tell which ethnic group anyone belongs to. A boy and a girl are drawn together; when he lights a cigarette, its brief flare lets him look into her eyes. They stand on scars in the pavement left by a mortar attack, then go to share a coffee by candlelight until curfew.
Ideas: love, hope and ordinary human needs survive even in war.
Methods: one long stanza of rhyming couplets; contrast between darkness and small points of light (the cigarette, the candles); the ordinary detail of romance set against reminders of death; a shift from the day's dangers to the night's tenderness.

Context: Angelou was an African American writer and civil rights activist. The poem draws on the history of slavery and racism.
Content: the speaker addresses an oppressor directly ('you'), listing the ways she has been put down, hated or lied about, and insists each time that she will rise.
Methods: direct address and rhetorical questions that challenge the oppressor; similes comparing her to powerful natural forces such as tides, the sun and the moon, rising dust and air; a confident, sometimes playful tone; a refrain that grows more insistent towards the end, where short repeated lines build to a triumphant climax.