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Jealousy In Maya Angelou's Caged Wolf

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Some feel free to live their lives, reveling in freedom, “But the caged bird stands on the grave of dreams his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream” (lines 26-27). The use of an oxymoron when placing dreams and nightmare in close vicinity adds significance to lost aspirations. Dreams, filled with light and hope, and nightmares, bursting with darkness and menace, strictly oppose each other. The caged bird once dreamed of freedom, but the interpreted connotation of “grave” implies that the dream died. His shadow – highlighted by the consonance in “shadow shouts” – restricts him, for envy blossoms within him in its presence, ever following him as he seeks to exist as the sole superior bird. Angelou reveals the theme of how jealousy can overcome
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The bird also symbolizes how people go too far with the amount of power they have. The bird has clipped wings, is trapped in a cage, and its feet are tied up, which means that the bird has no escape. The bird has no freedom and has no way to escape, because it cannot walk or run. Since the bird is being abused and has no power, it is traumatized and explains how its life is like a nightmare. In the text, it states, “His shadow shouts on a nightmare scream/his wings are clipped and his feet are tied” (Angelou paragraph 5).

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The hawks experienced true freedom in an unforgiving place and fought death. However death caught up with them and for example Jeffers says, “The lame feet of salvation: at night he remembers freedom and flies in a dream the dawn ruins it.” The dream of freedom is ended for both the hawks. The wings of the hawks represent freedom, the hawks use the wings to fly and Sheriff Bell, “raised one wing and let it fall again.” Both the hawks lived with no fear unlike “communal people”.

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In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, birds symbolize Edna Pontellier’s journey toward ultimate freedom. In the beginning, birds represent Edna feeling trapped and oppressed. For instance, the opening of the novel includes a parrot in a cage squawking at Leonce to ‘go away.’

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The metaphor of the birds also serves to create a sense of movement and tension within the poem, as the birds engage in a battle of wills that reflects the speaker's own struggle for

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By setting a standard through the innocent, “little black dog” and the content bird, the poet makes the harsh man stand out and really fail to be an ideal person. The bird and the dog live life without a care, knowing that “everything is answered, all taken care of”, although the speaker has worries about life and cannot escape the ideas of yesterday. Instead of being okay with the present moment, the speaker is stuck in a time that he can’t change, rendering him unable to focus on the positives that the morning has to offer. The poems “Five A.M.” and “Five Flights Up” have contrasting ideas.

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Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening opens with a scene of two birds, emphasizing that the motif of birds later within the novel will play an important part with setting the constant metaphor they bring. Throughout the whole novel the motif of birds is a metaphor for the Victorian women during that period -- caged birds serve as reminders of Edna’s entrapment and the entrapment of Victorian women in general. Edna makes many attempts to escape her cage (husband, children, and society), but her efforts only take her into other cages, such as the pigeon house. Edna views this new home as a sign of her independence, but the pigeon house represents her inability to remove herself from her former life, due to the move being just “two steps away” (122).

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The importance of having appreciation of our previous generations for what they have done for us and what they have left is highlighted in line 39, “Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave”. Also, “I am the dream and the hope of the slave” (40) shows how Angelou

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Undoubtedly, having paramount courage and undying love for the human race are the two virtues that anyone aspiring to live a life of purpose must have. In the Wikipedia article "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings," Angelou sheds light on the life she led as a child. She highlights the difficulties she had to go through when an opportunity for change was close to impossible (Wikipedia n.p.). Nevertheless, as a courageous young woman who discovered her passion for writing early, she used words to express herself, which later led to her success.

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A Bird’s Eye View Emily Dickinson opens up her poem with the famous line, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words,’’. Paul Laurence Dunbar ends his poem with the line “I know why the caged bird sings!”. These two lines from the poets form the theme of the two poems. The poem “Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson, and “Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar both present a theme that suffering makes you appreciate hope much more. It seems that hope and pain are almost a dynamic duo.

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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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The last line of the poem is “for the caged bird sings for freedom” (Angelou) this tells us that the caged bird yearns to be like the free bird. Angelou uses several descriptive images for the reader to be able to envision her words: bird, winds, floats and sky for freedom because the free bird has power, as “he soars in the sky” (Angelou) and clipped wings, tied feet and cage for confinement because the caged bird is oppressed as “caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown. ”(Angelou)

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Conversely, the tone in the fourth stanzas is more casual. The protagonist appears to be more settled, and appreciative to be finished with every one of her tasks. As at the time, Racism was practiced, Angelou could also be discussing about the African American slave lady who is compelled to do this work

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