Sympathy Analysis

"Sympathy" is a lyric poem, since it gives us a glimpse into the speaker's thoughts and emotions. Even though a lot of this poem describes what the caged bird feels, we can understand it as a lyric...

This speaker sure ain't happy. He's looking at this little caged bird, and he feels its pain. It's stuck in a cage, it can't fly around as birds are meant to do, and it's suffering a lot because it...

We'll find two contrasting settings in "Sympathy": the confined space of the cage that the bird is trapped in, and the wide open spaces of nature. The cage where the bird hangs out (not voluntarily...

As we mentioned over in the "Form and Meter" section, this poem is pretty tightly structured in terms of meter and rhyme scheme. But that's not all that's going on here. Close readers will find the...

This poem has a simple title: "Sympathy." On one level, this title indicates the "sympathy" that the speaker feels for the caged bird. He identifies with this bird and he feels its suffering. In th...

We can identify Paul Laurence Dunbar's work because of the type of poetry he likes to write. Dude was really into writing lyrics. His poems often have a first person speaker, who tells us about his...

This poem isn't really all that difficult, but it does take some effort to scale. On the surface, its subject matter is simple: it's a poem about an unhappy bird. Nothing to it, right? Well, not so...

Maya Angelou, the African-American writer and poet, took the title of her famous autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, from Dunbar's poem "Sympathy." Now we can show off our smarty-pants...

No feathers flying here, we're afraid. The bird in this poem can't even dream of hanky-panky with another bird. Being stuck in a cage alone can really put a cramp in your social life.