Sympathy

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1899

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Psychological Reality of Racism

Dunbar published “Sympathy” in a historical moment when American writers frequently represented Black Americans as happy or clueless collaborators in their own subordination. The white supremacist argument was that most Black Americans were content with their subordination, and that contentment was confirmation that inequality was simply part of the natural order of things. In “Sympathy,” Dunbar intervenes in this representation by using imagery from the natural world to show that there is nothing at all natural about oppression, and that Black Americans are resistant to white supremacist notions of order.

In “Sympathy,” there are two kinds of birds. There is “the first bird” (Line 5), who signals that dawn has come, and then there is “the caged bird” (Line 1), whose song is “a prayer” (Line 19) and “a plea” (Line 20). The presence of that other, first bird shows that a free-flying and singing bird is as natural as a shining sun or a “river [that] flows like a stream of glass” (Line 4). The image of the river as glass that has become molten underscores that nature dissolves all constraints. In contrast to the free flow of nature is the cage, composed of “cruel bars” (Line 9), and the “perch” (Line 10), which is what the “caged bird” (Line 8) has in place of a “bough a-swing” (Line 11). Dunbar presents the cage as a static, unforgiving distortion of the bird’s natural, original environment.

Part of the distorting influence of life in the cage is that it takes the natural movements and habits of the bird and makes them injurious to the bird. The bird creates the only motion it can when it “beats his wing” (Line 8), a movement that draws blood and makes wounds that create scar tissue. If the bird were content with its captivity, it would stop injuring itself and accommodate itself to life in the cage. Much in the same way, the speaker fights against racial oppression ceaselessly because it is part of human nature to want to be free.

Resistance Against Oppression

The bird in the cage has limited ways for expressing its resistance to being in the cage. One way is futilely beating its wings against the bars of the cage. Dunbar represents this form of resistance to constraint as understandable but ultimately self-destructive. The wounding and re-wounding the bird experiences as it engages in a direct, physical attack on the imprisoning structure will, over time, simply lead to more pain, not freedom.

The other mode the bird uses to express its resistance is through song. The bird resorts to song when “his wing is bruised and his bosom sore” (Line 16). The bird has reached the end of its ability to engage in direct confrontation with the cage. Dunbar portrays the song that the bird composes as one that the listener/reader could easily misunderstand as “a carol of joy or glee” (Line 18).

Much like the bird, the artist uses art as a less injurious way to engage in self-expression and to represent their resistance to oppression. When the speaker in the poem proclaims that they “know why the caged bird sings” (Line 21), it is an acknowledgment of the way that art can become a powerful vehicle that helps one remain resilient in the face of unrelenting oppression.

“Sympathy” as Social Protest Poetry

The end of the 19th century was a precarious time for Dunbar professionally and for Black Americans generally, as they dealt with racial violence and even more legal and social constraints; overt denunciation of racial oppression would have come with serious consequences. Dunbar instead couches his protest against racial oppression in natural imagery and the concept of sympathy.

The key influences on the way Dunbar thought about nature include the Romantics and the Transcendentalists. Romantic English poets such as William Wordsworth represent nature as a space where observers can reconnect with emotions and anarchic forces such as imagination in order to live more authentically. American Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson saw nature as a conduit for connecting to God or the divine, creative principle that orders the universe. Civilization, which forces people to be a part of institutions that are oppressive, should be thrown aside by communing with nature or engaging in creative acts, no matter how much pressure the forces of conformity bring to bear on the individual.

In “Sympathy,” Dunbar encourages the reader to consider the bird, a symbol for Black Americans, as a figure whose physical freedom and emotional reality are obscured because people believe it is an acceptable thing to place a bird in a cage. While the architects of the cage—the equivalent of white Americans and the oppressive institutions they control—expect the bird to sit meekly on its perch, the bird is defiant. The societal constraint the cage represents is racial oppression. Recognition of the cruelty of the bird’s captivity helps readers take off societal blinders that encourage them to ignore the constraints placed on Black Americans.

Dunbar also relies on the concept of sympathy, the idea that communing with nature directly, or recognizing that communion in another, is a pathway to understanding one’s connections to all living things. One of the tenets of white supremacy in the United States is the notion that Black Americans are fundamentally different from white people. Dehumanizing representations of Black people reinforce the belief that Black people are Others who exist outside of one’s community. The structure of the poem—a reader observing the speaker observing the captive bird observing the free bird—encourages the white reader to instead contemplate the ways in which they are implicated in constructing the cage.

Few people want to be the ones responsible for putting the bird in the cage. When Dunbar uses a speaker who knows and feels the struggles of the bird, he makes a place for the white reader to be someone else—at a minimum, a sympathetic observer who sees the resistance of Black Americans as a natural one, rooted in American ideals of liberty.