The eighteen poems in the second section, "Just Before the World Ends", focus on the experience of the survival of African Americans despite living in a society dominated by whites.

She acts as a spokesperson for her race in these poems, in which her use of irony and humor allows her to speak for the collective and to assume a distance in order to make comments about her themes, topics, and subjects.

[4] Many critics expected that the volume would be popular despite their negative reviews, but others considered it well written, lyrical, and a moving expression of social observation.

[5] After her rape at the age of eight, as recounted in her first autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she dealt with her trauma by memorizing and reciting great works of literature, including poetry, which helped bring her out of her self-imposed muteness.

"[12] The title is a reference to her belief that "we as individuals ... are still so innocent that we think if we asked our murderer just before he puts the final wrench upon the throat, 'Would you please give me a cool drink of water?'

[13] Death is an important theme throughout many of Angelou's works, especially in Caged Bird, which opens with it and, according to scholar Liliane K. Arensberg, is resolved at the book's end, when her son is born.

[14] According to scholar Yasmin Y. DeGout, many of the poems in Diiie, along with those in Angelou's second volume Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well, "lack the overt empowerment themes of her later, better known works",[15] especially And Still I Rise (1978) and I Shall Not Be Moved (1990).

[16] In Southern Women Writers, Carol Neubauer states that the first twenty poems in the volume "describe the whole gamut of love, from the first moment of passionate discovery to the first suspicion of painful loss".

DeGout views "A Zorro Man" as an example of Angelou's ability to translate her personal experience into political discourse and the "textured liberation" she places in all her poetry.

The poem and others in Diiie, with its focus on women's sexual and romantic experiences, challenges the gender codes of poetry written in previous eras.

[13] In his analysis of "They Went Home", Hagen calls Angelou a realist because she recognizes that the married man who dates other women usually returns to his wife.

[24] Essick, when analyzing "When I Think About Myself", states that the poem central theme is "one's self-exultation and self-pride that prevent one from losing her will in spite of experiences involving pain and degradation".

[16] According to Bloom, the themes in Angelou's poetry, which tend to be made up of short lyrics with strong, jazz-like rhythms, are common in the lives of many American Blacks.

Sylvester says that Angelou uses the same technique in "Letter to an Aspiring Junkie", in which understatement contained in the repeated phrase "nothing happens" is a litotes for the prevalence of violence in society.

According to Hagen, the poem is full of disturbing images, such as drugs being a slave master and the junkie being tied to his habit like a monkey attached to the street vendor's strap.

[27] Line six in "Harlem Hopscotch," for example ("If you're white, all right / If you're brown, hang around / If you're black stand back"), is a popular jingle used by African Americans that people of other cultures might not recognize.

[2] African-American literature professor Priscilla R. Ramsey, when analyzing the poem "When I Think About Myself," states that the first-person singular pronoun "I", which Angelou uses often, is a symbol that refers to all her people.

The shoeshiner takes on the role of the trickster, a common character in Black folklore, and demonstrates his control of vernacular language, especially when he refers to the Dozens.

"[23] Martha Liddy, who reviewed the collection in the same issue of the Library Journal in 1971, classified it, like Caged Bird, in the young adult category and called Diiie a "volume of marvelously lyrical, rhythmical poems".

[18] A reviewer from Choice called the poems in Diiie "craftsmanlike and powerful though not great poetry",[34] and recommended it for libraries with a collection of African-American literature.

Critic William Sylvester, who says that Angelou "has an uncanny ability to capture the sound of a voice on a page",[1] places her poems, especially the ones in this volume, in the "background of black rhythms".

[1] Chad Walsh, reviewing Diiie in Book World, calls Angelou's poems "a moving blend of lyricism and harsh social observation".