Sympathy Theme of Freedom and Confinement

"Sympathy" is all about wishing for freedom and hating on confinement. After all, it's a poem about a "caged bird," a bird that isn't free to fly around and eat little worms or build a nest in a tree—which is, you know, what birds are meant to do. But the speaker describes this caged bird in order to describe his own lack of freedom and oppression. He feels like the caged bird because, like that bird, he isn't free.

1. Why does the speaker use the metaphor of the caged bird to give a sense of his own lack of freedom? Why doesn't he just talk about his own lack of freedom directly?
2. What is the relationship between "Sympathy," the title of the poem, and freedom?
3. How does the speaker give us a sense of the bird's confinement in the poem? What images are used to evoke this confinement?
4. In what ways is repetition used to give us a sense of the speaker's own sense of oppression and confinement in the poem?

Without suffering confinement, the speaker would never truly be able to appreciate freedom (and that goes double for the bird).

The speaker doesn't want freedom for himself in the poem. He wants freedom for the bird.