Trapped. Nowhere to go and no one to turn to. You sing. But does your song really reach anyone? If you ever felt this way you certainly would have felt like the birds in these poems. 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. The soft alliteration portrays how peaceful freedom is, “the wind stirs soft through the springing grass.” To be freed from the cage and being able to experience the world, the feeling of liberation, that's what freedom feels like. The bird started with freedom but ended up being caged. Freedom did not last long for the bird. In the first and last line of the stanza its creates a cage by repeating, “I know what the caged bird feels.” Therefore the bird is stuck in
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The bird is privileged “and dares to claim the sky.” Further on in the poem, the bird had the courage to name “the sky his own.” Since it is free it has the capability to do whatever he pleases. There's no limit for the bird. If he wants to claim the sky he can claim it. There's no one stopping it and that's what freedom is. No one is holding you back or telling it what to do. You aren’t trapped. Comparable to the first poem you see imagery like it “dips his wing in the orange sunrays. Or “the trade winds soft through the sighing trees.” The free bird has the freedom to be exposed new experience and to see the beauty of life. These are all experiences that a caged bird will never experience. It has been free its whole life it , so it doesn't know the struggles of being