Summary
The speaker continues to alternate between making statements about life in Harlem and giving instructions for a game of Hopscotch. They mention that everyone is unemployed, then instruct listeners to stay still for three counts before twisting and jerking. They then remind players of one of the most important rules of hopscotch: if you cross the line and move out of your correct square, you're out of the game. That's the fundamental principle of "hopping." When both of your feet touch the ground, the game is over. The speaker says that, since they are now out of the game, everyone seems to think that they have lost the game. However, the speaker disagrees, and thinks that getting out of the game actually means that they've won.
Analysis
The poem's final two lines, set aside in a rhymed couplet of their own, offer an enigmatic-sounding, riddle-like conclusion to the game of hopscotch. Since we know that hopscotch is being used here as an extended metaphor for daily life burdened by racism and poverty, it only makes sense that this statement about getting "out" of the game would also be related to this broader figurative scenario. It seems that the speaker is describing a choice to reject the social rules they have been taught, essentially refusing to play the "game" of life under oppressive social structures. They are choosing, for instance, to no longer follow dictates like "everybody for hisself" or "since you black, don't stick around." This means that they'll be less successful according to the specific metrics of success developed by that racist and oppressive society, causing other people to believe that they have lost the game. But for the speaker, getting to live outside of the dictates of that oppressive society is itself a type of success.
We can see just how radically the speaker has departed from these external metrics of success in the poem's form. It's not just that this final, surprising statement occupies a short stanza of its own. The poem's final line is also written in a different meter from all twelve previous lines. The stress in the line "They think I lost. I think I won." falls on the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth syllables rather than the first, third, fifth, and seventh. In other words, it's written in iambic tetrameter rather than trochaic trimeter. Iambs, in which stress is placed on the second of two syllables rather than the first, sound somewhat more natural to the average English speaker's ear. While the choppy trochees of the previous lines mimicked the hops of a hopscotch player, here we see that the speaker is able to move through the world at an easier and more enjoyable pace. Furthermore, while the previous lines were each written with seven syllables—three trochees followed by an awkward extra syllable—this final line consists of eight syllables, spread out over four satisfyingly complete iambs. The effect, overall, lets us know that the speaker has found a level of peace and certainty that they couldn't while they were wrapped up in the "game."
This poem has fourteen lines, spread across three quatrains and a couplet, with an abrupt shift in form, content, and perspective following line twelve. These are pretty sure signs that "Harlem Hopscotch" is a sonnet, specifically an English or Shakespearian sonnet. The typical English sonnet follows a different rhyme scheme and meter from this poem. It's written in the easy-sounding iambic pentameter, while here, Angelou opts for a shorter line evoking the terse, tense mood of a hopscotch game (or of life under racism). And English sonnets usually follow an ABAB rhyme scheme, intertwining lines across a stanza from one another. Here, Angelou's AABB rhyme allows her to pair sets of juxtaposed lines, with each comment about hopscotch rhyming with a subsequent line about life in Harlem. Still, the most fundamental moment of a sonnet, the volta, remains in Angelou's modified version. A volta (which translates to "turn") is the moment in a sonnet where the poem abruptly changes, suddenly taking on a new perspective or looking at the issue in an unexpected way. In an English sonnet, the volta usually comes right before the final couplet, which means that the last two lines represent a quippy, clever, surprising, and sometimes enigmatic shift away from all that has come before. Thus, an English sonnet can be a great way to present an idea in-depth before abruptly turning it on its head. That's exactly what Angelou does here, by laying out the rules of a game or way of life in detail before suddenly making us wonder why those rules need to exist at all.
