Sympathy

“Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar is a lyrical poem in first person, using the pronoun “I” to signal the direct point of view and perspective of the speaker. Dunbar develops the theme of The Psychological Reality of Racism through extended metaphor, nature imagery, and symbolism.

Dunbar frames his poem with the title “Sympathy.” In the Romantic-Era poetry that so influenced Dunbar and other American poets of the 19th century, sympathy is an identification with an Other, a connection that allows one to overcome the barriers that separate one individual from another, or of humans from the natural world. In selecting this title, Dunbar signals to the reader his connection to the Romantic poets and his belief that white readers could see Black Americans as peers through the lens of sympathy.

Dunbar introduces “the caged bird” (Line 1) as an extended metaphor (a detailed comparison of two unlike things) for Black Americans as they experience racism in the United States. He establishes the sorrowful tone of the poem with the word “alas” (Line 1). He further emphasizes the woeful, lonely existence of the caged bird and the oppressed Black American by setting “alas” (Line 1) off with caesuras (breaks or pauses in the line) achieved with a comma before the word and an exclamation point after.

The first stanza is built around a series of images that appeal to the senses. The natural world in this stanza is rife with possibility, down to the sound of “the first bird [that] sings and the first bud [that] opes” (Line 5). These are images that one associates with dawn, a universal symbol for hope and beginnings in Western culture. The bird in the cage is able to hear birds outside the cage sing and can even smell flower buds, the scent of which Dunbar describes as “faint perfume from its chalice” (Line 6). A chalice is a cup (one usually used in sacred rituals), with the Holy Grail, the life-giving mythical goblet that held drops of Jesus Christ’s blood from his crucifixion, being the most famous one in Western literature. The bird’s apprehension of the scent of the flower is only “faint” (Line 6), which indicates that the bird is separated from the potential renewal that comes from free play in nature.

These images, word choices, and the allusion to the “chalice” (Line 6) all combine to make the natural world outside the cage a symbol for natural rights, the inherent freedom that belongs to a being. There is no description just yet of life inside the cage, in contrast to the vivid life outside the cage. That blank space not only represents the barrenness of the cage but also the emotion that comes with having one’s birthright within sight but out of reach. The sympathy the speaker feels is one of sadness, which the speaker contains between nearly identical lines ending with exclamation points in Lines 1 and 7.

In the second stanza, the tone shifts as the speaker describes life inside the cage. The “cruel bars” (Line 9) of the cage are stained with the blood of the bird that “beats his wing” (Line 8). The bird’s movement shows that, far from being content with its captivity, the bird is actively working against the limitations on its physical freedom. This struggle against the bars is so longstanding that the bird’s new wounds cause “throbs in the old, old scars” (Line 12) created by these struggles. In contrast to the relatively lighter mood of exclusion expressed in Lines 2-6 in the first stanza, the emotion contained within the first and last lines of the second stanza is desperation. This desperation isn’t the result of processes like life and death in the natural world. Instead, artificial constraints like the “cruel bars” (Line 9) and the “perch” (Line 10) are the creation of the nameless captor of the bird. If the bird is an object of pity, the captor is the cruel author of the bird’s imprisonment. The bird’s return to the perch is an image of futility.

In the third stanza, Dunbar rehearses the painful realities of life in the cage (“When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,— / When he beats his bars and he would be free;” [Lines 16-17]) and then extends the metaphor through the figure of the bird’s song. In Western culture, bird song has long been a symbol for the beauty of nature and the freedom and sense of rightness the human observer feels as they engage with this beauty. Dunbar revises this symbol by rejecting bird song as “a carol of joy or glee” (Line 18) and instead offers that it is “a prayer” (Line 19) and a “plea” (Line 20) for liberation from that which constrains the bird.

Dunbar makes no direct reference to race or racial oppression in the poem, so it requires reading around the poem to understand the implications of the bird’s song as a plea for freedom. As a Black poet, Dunbar encountered frequent constraints because of racial oppression. In this poem, he uses standardized, literary English to represent what it means to live under that constraint, while in other poems in Lyrics of the Hearthside (the collection that includes “Sympathy”), he represents Black American life using homey scenes and archetypes of Black identity taken from American literature that sees life before the Civil War nostalgically. These poems in African American Vernacular English were Dunbar’s bread and butter, in that their popularity with white audiences allowed him to make a living as a working writer during a time when there were few paths to such a career for Black Americans.

The sterner, more somber themes in Dunbar’s poetry generally come in poems written in standardized, literary English—the only song available that would signal to white readers that they must understand the suffering and oppression of Black Americans as a real and serious thing worthy of writing into the Anglo American literary tradition. If there is something fundamentally wrong with caging a bird and forcing it to bend its joyful song into a “plea” (Line 20) that only God hears, it is that much more tragic to do the same thing to the Black poet, a human being.

Dunbar ultimately uses the poem to represent the destructive, distorting impact of racism on Black Americans and the cost of this cultural context on the Black poet. Relying on poetic diction for this social commentary is a testament to the power and limits of art as resistance.