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To Stephanie
A.'s essay on Sympathy
written by Paul Laurence Dunbar
This poem is about freedom. Dunbar was a young black man when he he
wrote it. He was talking about how it feels to be held back by racial people. When he says
"I know how the caged bird feels," he is saying that he knows what it's like to
surrounded by bars. His bars are more because of his color, while the bird in the poem's
bars are real. Both sets of bars keep them from freedom.The reason the author wrote this poem was to
express how he feels, how his people feel. He is surrounded by people of another color,
the same people that caused his own to be slaves. He's talking about the pain of not being
free, of being thought worthy of being free.When he says that the bars of the cage are
bloody, it's how he feels inside. He's trying to break out of the confinement of being
black. He's trying to fight against the bars that hold him back. It makes him bloody and
bruised. It is hard for him to fight like that.He talks about freedom, being outside the cage,
and it's beautiful and spring-like. But he has to sit in his cage and look at the world
outside, at the freedom outside. It is very frustrating and he cries, like the bird cries,
for release. This poem shows his hatred for racism and
slavery. It is very powerful, more so because it comes from a young black man whose
parents were slaves.
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