Caged Bird

“Caged Bird” features an extended metaphor that compares the plight of the birds in the poem to oppressed people in the real world. Angelou’s entire literary career corresponded with her activism for social justice for Black Americans and for women, and this poem works as an activist message for both groups.

The caged bird metaphor is an allusion to a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar called “Sympathy” (1899). Dunbar’s poem is also about the plight of Black Americans, and Angelou appropriated it for the title of her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which details Angelou’s early years navigating childhood trauma and racism.

In “Caged Bird,” the titular bird is confined. Angelou is careful in her descriptions of the environment the bird must live in, calling it “narrow” (Line 9), difficult to see through (Line 10), surrounded by “bars of rage” (Line 11), a “grave of dreams” (Line 27), and “a nightmare scream” (Line 28). Additionally, Angelou adds another impediment to the bird’s movement, saying the bird’s “wings are clipped and / his feet are tied” (Lines 12-13). This means that even if someone were to open the cage, the bird still could not escape due to his clipped wings and bound feet.

Yet in this terrible image, there is still some hope. The caged bird’s response to this captivity is to sing. Singing is a powerful act of expression and emotion, so the bird’s ability to sing gives him some agency even in his imprisonment.

The bird’s song contains “a fearful trill” (Line 16), meaning it is not the most confident song. This is because the bird is singing about something he doesn’t understand, which is freedom. The bird is apprehensive as he sings about freedom, but it is something that the bird wants. Because of the bird’s intense desire for freedom, his song “is heard / on the distant hill” (Lines 19-20). The power of the captive bird’s song echoes across the land like the freedom songs sung by enslaved people. The music echoes, and so do the pleas of the captive and the cries of pain. This is not a song to ignore.

What elevates this poem is Angelou’s inclusion of the free bird who seems to actively ignore the song of the caged bird. After the caged bird’s song echoes throughout the land, “[t]he free bird thinks of another breeze” (Line 23). This implies that the free bird hears the song of the caged bird but chooses to go about his privileged life instead of helping the caged bird.

While the concept here is a bit complex, it is worth noting. Angelou was great friends with Martin Luther King Jr., whose assassination played a major role in her writing her book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. “Caged Bird” recycles the metaphor that Angelou used right after King’s assassination. One of King’s most pressing criticisms about American society was the complacency of what he called the white moderate, meaning the vast majority of white Americans who did not consider themselves racists like the Ku Klux Klan, but who, nevertheless, did nothing to actively bring about social equity and change for Black Americans. Angelou is echoing that belief that her great friend believed in. It’s not the free bird’s freedom that is wrong; it’s the free bird’s apathy that hurts the most.

Angelou includes the free bird to show the drastic contrast between those with power and those without it. The free bird opens the poem with a typical image of a bird: He soars across an expansive, lively sky. The sun is orange, the wind moves the bird like a stream, and the bird’s wings open, dip, and glide through the expansive sky.

Angelou ends the first stanza and the fourth stanza with comments about this freedom, suggesting that the free bird “dares to claim the sky” (Line 7) and “names the sky his own” (Line 26). Clearly, this free bird enjoys freedom and its ensuing power. He has the power to claim and name the sky: This is similar to how white slave owners had the power to claim and name enslaved people, and it’s similar to how white Americans during the Jim Crow era had the power to claim and name whatever they liked. Ultimately, the contrast here shows the drastic differences in the lives, feelings, and experiences of white and Black Americans. One group knows power and freedom; the other doesn’t.

Alternatively, it is possible to interpret the two birds as representing men and women. The free bird represents the male patriarchy that holds power in society and that experiences the political, social, economic, and psychological freedom that men in America have enjoyed. Meanwhile, the caged bird represents the women in America who, for hundreds of years, did not enjoy the same rights as men, including suffrage, economic independence, and the same rights under the law. Angelou’s writing meets at the intersection between Black American rights and women’s rights, so it is possible that this poem can be about either of those groups or both. In fact, because the poem does not specify what the metaphor refers to, it lends itself to any oppressed group or person. The poem, more than anything, is about the need to be free and the pain of confinement.