Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
The speaker is an unidentified "youth"—implied to be well-educated, male, and a cultural outsider—who has a complex and ambivalent relationship to America.
Form and Meter
Iambic pentameter (five beats or stressed syllables per line, usually ten or eleven syllables), with a "Shakespearean" rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFEFGG
Metaphors and Similes
"she feeds me bread of bitterness" - metaphor comparing America's treatment of the speaker to giving him bitter bread to eat
"sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth" - metaphor comparing America's ill-treatment and violence of the speaker to a tiger's bite
"my breath of life" - metaphor comparing the speaker's well-being to breath
"her vigor flows like tides" - simile comparing America's vigor to tides
"her bigness sweeps my being like a flood" - simile similarly comparing America's sweeping bigness to a flood
"as a rebel fronts a king in state" - simile comparing the speaker to a rebel before a king
"I stand within her walls" - metaphor comparing America's—and implicitly, the sonnet's—confines to walls
"the touch of Time's unerring hand" - metaphor comparing the workings of time to a hand
"like priceless treasures" - simile comparing America's "wonders" to invaluable treasures
Alliteration and Assonance
"bread of bitterness" - alliteration
"tiger's tooth" - alliteration
"my breath of life, I" - assonance (long "i" sound)
"like tides into my" - assonance (long "i" sound)
"her hate" - alliteration
"I gaze into the days" - assonance (long "a" sound)
"touch of Time's" - alliteration
Irony
"I love this cultured hell" is ironic, claiming that the speaker loves America even though it is a hell. The whole poem is shot through with this sense of ambivalence and irony.
Genre
Sonnet
Setting
Unspecified
Tone
ambivalent; disillusioned; passionate; bitter; confident
Protagonist and Antagonist
The speaker is the protagonist and "America" is the antagonist, although the relationship is complex.
Major Conflict
The conflict of the poem is simultaneously that of the protagonist vs. America (who both sustains and harms him) and the internal conflict within the speaker regarding his feelings towards America (as he both hates/resists and loves it).
Climax
The poem's climax, to the extent that there is one, comes in the final four lines when the speaker envisions America's empire crumbling into the sands.
Foreshadowing
The final four lines foretell America's future demise.
Understatement
"tests my youth" - understates the violence America does to him as "testing" him
"as a rebel fronts a king in state / I stand within her walls with not a shred / Of terror, malice. Not a word of jeer" - understates the feelings of a "rebel" towards a "king" (and understates the speaker's own resentment towards America)
Allusions
"darkly I gaze" - alludes to the famous passage from 1 Corinthians 13:12, rendered in The King James Bible as "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."
the final four lines allude to Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias," where a traveler in the "lone and level sands" of a desert reports encountering the "colossal Wreck" of a ruined statue with the following inscription on its pedestal: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Metonymy and Synecdoche
"sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth" - this metaphor of sinking her tooth uses one single "tooth" as a synecdoche for being bitten (and less literally, for being attacked or drained of life)
Personification
America is personified as a "she" throughout the poem and is also specifically compared to a tigress and a king
Hyperbole
Much of the speaker's figurative and ironic language could be taken as a form of hyperbole, like when he states that he has "not a shred / Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer."
