Sympathy

Sympathy, by Paul Laurence Dunbar

I know what the caged bird feels, alas! 
    When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;   
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,   
And the river flows like a stream of glass; 
    When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,   
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals— 
I know what the caged bird feels! 

I know why the caged bird beats his wing 
    Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;   
For he must fly back to his perch and cling   
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing; 
    And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars   
And they pulse again with a keener sting— 
I know why he beats his wing! 

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, 
    When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,— 
When he beats his bars and he would be free; 
It is not a carol of joy or glee, 
    But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,   
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings— 
I know why the caged bird sings!

Starting from the title and then going on with the poem we are told by the poet or better the narrator about his sympathetic link with a caged bird, he is probably looking at this bird and he sees himself in this caged animal. He is trying to express himself through the behavior of an animal that is meant to be free, which can fly and see and experience the world. In this way, he can feel what the bird can feel. He knows the struggle of wanting something bigger than what you can have at the moment. They both know that they are not made to be in those conditions, they want more because they know that they are made for more, maybe they had a previous experience of that freedom and they want to reconquer it. The bird sings and he too, he sings through this poem. According to the narrator, the bird is singing because he can’t be free and so he starts a singing that is a prayer, I think that the desire of the bird could be a sort of romantic striving for infinite, they want to overcome the limits but they can't, so they are singing. This is why the bird is singing „a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core". A prayer is something you say to someone else, usually someone more powerful than you. So they are singing hoping to receive help from “someone”. The narrator has the knowledge but that seems to bring him nowhere, just like the bird.

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