Sympathy | Paul Laurence Dunbar
Channel: The Skip Channel
Date: 2020-04-02

“Sympathy” by Paul Lawrence Dunbar

Why does a caged bird sing? What kind of song is this bird singing? Is it a happy song?
No.

Look at lines 18-20 (Here’s my textual support.)

It is NOT a [song] of joy or glee, it’s a prayer, a plea to Heaven!

What is a bird designed to do? It’s designed to fly and can it fly in a cage? No
And it doesn’t matter how fancy it is or how large it is, it’s still a cage.

Now, Dunbar’s parents were freed slaves. That’s important to know. His parents were once slaves and maybe his grandparents were, too.

So when he writes “I know why the caged bird sings” he’s not just talking about birds.

You see, this is an extended metaphor. The bird and the cage and the suffering represent something else. It could be ANY animal in a cage – a tiger pacing back and forth at the zoo, one of those orca whales stuck in a little swimming pool… This metaphor relates to them as well.

For Dunbar though, it’s more personal. He’s talking about the African-American experience in the mid- to late-1800s. (He died in 1906.) He’s talking about the plight of the slaves of the past and the former slaves of Dunbar’s present, and we can extend it to apply to the oppression of any minority group in our present or during the Civil Rights Movement.

That’s the beauty of a great poem – You can relate to it.

And you can, can’t you. It’s April of 2020 and for the last month and for the next month, we’re all what?

We’re like that bird – March 19 was the first day of spring - We see the bright sun and feel the wind blowing (lines 2 and 3), the flower blooming and the sweet smell of the outdoors (lines 6 and 7), but we can’t go out and enjoy it. We’re “staying at home, and staying safe,” left to gaze out the window and into our screens trying to reach out to our friends, but ultimately returning to our perch (line 10) searching for something to free us from quarantine.

Henry David Thoreau was a great American writing who was put in jail once for not paying his taxes and he said, “You can imprison my body, but not my mind.)

As you read the poem and answer the questions, think about how Dunbar describes the plight and feelings of the bird, and how it can relate to more than just a bird in a cage.

There are some archaic (old) words in the poem that are important to your understanding.
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;

Since I know there’s a question about the word fain, I’m not going to directly define it here.
But what is the bird doing? He’s trying to get out of the cage, he’s banging against the bars, but he can’t get out so he has to go back to his perch and do what? Cling. Not sit, not rest, but cling. Think about the connotations of cling. Is this something positive? Does he want to go back to the perch? No.

What does he want? Well, he wants to be out on a bough? What’s that? It’s a tree limb. It’s outside.  So when it says he has to go back and sit on the perch when he would fain go sit in a tree outside, what does “fain” mean? Look at your answer choices and see which one fits.

And question five asks, “How does stanza 1 contribute to the development of the poem’s theme?” What IS the theme? That goes back to question 1. If you know what the theme is in regard to “freedom” how does the first stanza develop that. When Dunbar is describing how nice it is outside, how does that make it worse for the bird?