Stanza 2 Summary

Lines 8-9

 I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;

• Blood? We don't like blood.
• And neither does our speaker. This bird he's presenting to us is so unhappy, it's beating its wings against the bars until they bleed. And why is it doing that? Because it wants to fly from the cage, but it can't. How can its little wings break down those tough metal bars?
• Here, again, the speaker identifies himself with the bird, and with its struggle for freedom. He, like the bird, wants to get free.
• Biography note: It might help to know here that Paul Laurence Dunbar, the author of the poem, was an African-American poet who wrote a lot of poetry about the oppression of African-Americans. So, even though the word "race" hasn't even been mentioned once so far in this poem, we can see the oppression that the bird feels as a metaphor for the oppression that African-Americans living during Dunbar's era (at the turn of the twentieth century) experienced.
• Back to the poem: we also get some alliteration in the repetition of those hard and dull B sounds in these lines. The alliteration is working to give us a sense of the bird "beating" its wings against the bars. Check out "Sound Check" for more details.

Lines 10-11

 For he must fly back to his perch and cling
 When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;

• The bird would rather be swingin' on a bough ( "fain" means that the bird would "prefer" to be hanging out on a bough, or a tree branch). A cage totally cramps its style (understandable).
• Instead, the bird has to hang out on its little perch in the cage, clinging there because it has nowhere else to go.
• We can see rhyme at play in these lines as well, with "cling" rhyming with "a-swing." Throughout the poem, Dunbar uses rhyme to create rhythms and give the poem a musical sound. Head on over to "Form and Meter" for those details.

Lines 12-14

And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
 And they pulse again with a keener sting—
 I know why he beats his wing!

• The reference to the "old, old scars" here suggests that this isn't the first time the little birdie is beating its wings against the bars. It really, really wants to leave that cage, so much so that it keeps hurting itself (eesh).
• Each time the bird beats its wings against the bars, its old scars "pulse," or throb again. This suggests the idea of recurring pain. The bird suffers over and over again; its pain isn't limited.
• At the end of this second stanza, the speaker repeats to us again that he identifies with the bird's suffering.
• In this stanza, the rhyme scheme varies slightly, though it's essentially unchanged. Our pattern now is ABAABAA with only two rhyming sounds in this stanza, as opposed to three rhymes in stanza 1. That's because the last two lines (13-14) don't go off into their own rhyme. They stay locked up in the stanza's earlier sounds (lines 8, 10-11). It kind of seems appropriate to this poem about confinement, eh? Check out "Form and Meter" for more details.