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Caged Bird Maya Angelou Analysis

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Maya Angelou once said, “We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.” Throughout her life, Maya grew through multiple hardships as a young black woman including racism and being raped. According to the Encyclopedia of World Biography, her uncles killed the rapist, resulting in Maya blaming herself for it and not speaking for five years because she believed “her words brought death” (par 1). Once she started speaking again, Maya broke out of her shell and got involved with dance and theater. These forms of expression led to her self-discovery and the development of her strong will and determination. With many life experiences and a creative mind at hand, Maya started using poetry to express her beliefs. Quoted by Lyman Hagenas …show more content…

In the poem when Maya discusses the free bird, she is representing how whites are able to be happy and carefree and are encouraged to “claim the sky.” The white people in America during Maya’s time had an easy ticket to the so-called American dream. They never had to experience racial oppression. The blacks are the caged bird that is tied down and “sings of freedom” because freedom isn’t already given. Black people have to fight for what they deserve because they are denied their rights. Racism is the cage around the caged bird. Furthermore, the theme of resilience is shown by the caged singing for freedom in the face of fear. The poem says, “The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still.” Maya writes this to symbolize the determination the blacks. Even though they feared the repercussions of standing up for themselves and demanding their rights, they stood up nonetheless. In addition, the theme of resilience becomes further influential when coupled with the tone of perseverance. By including both in the way she did, Maya successfully represented blacks as strong, capable people in the face of racial injustice. In total, the theme of race and resilience in “Caged Bird” presented Maya’s position towards racial

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Rhetorical Analysis: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings In her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelo commemorates and admires strong independent black women and strives to become a well-educated woman herself. Through the use of visual imagery, Angelou describes Mrs. Flowers as a refined black woman to convey to the audience a feeling of pride and recognition for all sophisticated black women and a sense of empathy for Maya. Maya compares Mrs. Flowers to the “women in English novels” who had the luxury to sit “in front of roaring fireplaces” and drink “tea incessantly from silver trays” (93). The visual description of the “fireplace” and “tea” demonstrates to the reader the value that white women have in this society.

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III. a. Maya Angelou was an avid writer, speaker, activist and teacher. As a result of the many hardships that she suffered while growing up as a poor black woman in the south she has used her own experiences as the subject matter of her written work. In doing this she effectively shows how she was able to overcome her personal obstacles. Her autobiography “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) tells the story of her life and how she overcame and moved forward triumphantly in spite of her circumstances.

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Freeman sexually abused Maya, she is unable to control her body or words which signals the domination of her body by others. Even in the opening scene, there is a combination of Maya’s inability to control her appearance, words, and bodily functions. The inability to create a story about her body “pervades the remainder of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as Maya struggles to cope with her emerging womanhood” (Vermillion 252). Instead of letting the mute and sexually abused Maya represent the black female body in her text, she begins to reembody Maya by critiquing her admiration for white literary speech and writing.

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Maya Angelou was a strong African-American women who made an influential impact on the Civil Rights Movement, in bother her actions, and her literature. Her life experiences and courage helped others, and made her work influential. During Maya’s early life, she experienced many hardships that shaped her into the person many remember her as. Born on April 4, 1928, she only lived in St. Louis, MO for three years before her parents got divorced, and Maya, along with her mother and brother, moved in with her grandparents in Arkansas. At the age of eight, raped by her mother’s boyfriend, Maya learned the power that words possess.

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His poem Sympathy is just one example of how he felt trapped like a caged bird in his life. Even though the Civil War was over, African Americans still did not have as many privileges and opportunities as most White people had. Most of Dunbar’s writing showed his perspective of life and the struggles that came with it. Maya Angelou was born in 1928 and suffered a hard childhood that later on affected her writing. When she was eight years old, Maya was sexually abused and raped by her mother’s boyfriend.

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Huda Paracha                                                                                                                        812                      To Kill A Mockingbird And Caged Birds                    “We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated. ”- Maya Angelou     Have you ever had any emotional or physical struggles in your life that sometimes made you feel as if though you were caged and unable to achieve your goal?

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She shows us that despite the injustices that may occur, there will always be victory for those who truly deserve it. Maya Angelou's perspective as a young African American girl is described in Chapter 19 of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, titled Champion of the World. Her community is gathered to support Joe Louis, the former champion, in a boxing match that determines if he'll continue being champion or not. As the story progresses in her grandmother's and uncle’s store, the tone transforms from hopeful to defeated, to triumphant.

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The poems use the caged bird to represent the lack of freedom that both of the authors have. In each poem the caged bird uses singing as his only hope, because when there is nothing left for him to do he sings. Each

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I think that this poem, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” is saying that some people have more rights than others. And the caged bird is showing the people that don’t have the rights. And the free bird is like showing the people that have the rights and don’t have to stress. When they use the word singing I think they are saying that the free bird has the

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The bird is interpreted as the symbol of the African-American people, beating their metaphorical wings against their past cages of slavery, and the current cage of segregation and discrimination. Dunbar highlights this notion, declaring, “I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, / When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore, - / When he beats his bars and he would be free; / It is not a carol of joy or glee” (Dunbar, “Sympathy” 555). Dunbar addresses the fact that he is able to relate to this bird, and mentions the fact that the bird wishes it could be free; much like the African-Americans wished they could be free from discrimination at the time, while the bruises on the bird’s wings and body symbolize the mental abuse being enforced. Dunbar uses his poem to lay the groundwork for future forms of African-American literature by perpetrating the desire for freedom and equality.

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This explication is on the poem “Africa” by Maya Angelou. In the poem, the speaker shows the suffering of Africa by personification, imagery, and wordplay to result that Africa is moving forward to regain herself to give us all the world has done to Africa. The speaker is a knowledgeable person who is passionate and knows well about Africa. The poem takes the setting of Africa and in the time period around the 1400s - 1500s. The poem is an ABAB pattern with three stanzas.

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The oppression is binding the bird to its cage while the bird hopes and prays that someone will hear him so that he can leave this maiming tyranny. In addition in “Caged Bird” the bird is singing with mighty voice that was conceived by the rage that the bird felt toward the oppression that was trapping it. The tune that the bird sings is described as, “The caged bird sings,/ with a fearful trill,/ of things unknown”(Angelou, 30-32). The bird is illustrating the anger that it felt, by fighting the tyranny that he is facing. The tyranny is holding him down and the rage that the bird feels from this pain is what the bird symbolizes.

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In the two poems Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Caged Bird by Maya Angelou, gave a comparison between the life of a caged bird and the life of a slave. There are similarities and differences in the two poems. The difference between the two poem is that Sympathy is more aggressive than the poem Caged Bird, and the similarities of the two poems is the theme and imagery. The poem Sympathy the poem

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Lines one through seven define the free bird as one that “floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wing in the orange sun rays” (Angelou) this is a representation of freedom and joy. The second and third stanza lines, eight through fourteen defines the caged bird that “stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage” (Angelou) where these words reference isolation and despair compared to the freedom in stanza one. These lines create a visual response of the bird’s environments. The third stanza is repeated at the end of the poem for prominence as it reflects the two birds are so different.

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In the poems “Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar and “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou, both portray captive birds that sing. However in “Sympathy”, the bird pleads with god for freedom, whereas in “Caged Bird” the captive bird calls for help from a free bird. In “Sympathy” the bird knows what freedom feels like since there was a time where the bird was once free, but now is trapped. In the first stanza the use of imagery revealed how freedom felt before the bird was caged.

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