Imagine you're a little birdie stuck in a cage alone—no flying, no hanging out with your other bird buddies. You couldn't build a little nest or watch your eggs hatch. Sad, isn't it? It's kind of like being locked up in a prison cell.

Well, Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Sympathy" is a poem that describes the terrible experience of being a bird stuck in a cage. The bird in this poem flaps its wings and sings, but not because it's happy. It flaps its wings and sings because it's, well, miserable.

But why, we might ask, is Paul Laurence Dunbar bothering to write a poem about a bird stuck in a cage? You see, this is a poem that's about more than a caged bird. It's a poem about lack of freedom. The speaker of the poem begins by telling us that he "knows how caged bird feels," and then spends the resting of the poem describing how terrible its life is. Dunbar's not talking about a real bird, though. Nope—instead the caged bird becomes a metaphor for the speaker's own lack of freedom, his own oppression.

Considering that Paul Laurence Dunbar was an African-American poet writing at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries ("Sympathy" was published in his 1899 collection Lyrics of the Hearthside), it's quite likely that this poor bird's oppression represents the oppression of all African-Americans during this period. In other words, the speaker of the poem uses the image of the locked up bird to give us a sense of what it feels like to live without freedom. And judging from the bird's experience, it's zero fun.

We all know about racism, that horrible system that discriminates against people based on the color of their skin. America was founded on slavery, after all. And then, after slavery ended, we had Jim Crow segregation. For most of its history, America was the "land of the free" only for white people—very bad times.

Even if we know about this history of racism, we may not actually know what it felt like to live in a society where we couldn't vote because of our skin color, where we couldn't ride in certain train cars, or couldn't get certain jobs, or couldn't eat in certain restaurants because we were black.

This is why Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem "Sympathy" is so instructive. The poem doesn't mention the word "race" or "racism" once, but through its description of the caged bird, we learn exactly what it felt like for people like African-Americans who were denied basic freedoms in society. To make sure we don't go back to this terrible period in history, it's important to understand its impact. And if we want to understand what oppression feels like, well, there's no better place to start than "Sympathy."