Assignment:
The purpose of this essay is to explicate or analyze a reading that you choose from the assigned readings in Unit Two. Write an MLA-style comparison/contrast essay of no fewer than 1000 words; no outside sources should be used in this essay; it should come entirely from your own analysis. Thesis statement and draft plan must be pre-approved by the instructor, but students are allowed creative flexibility with regard to approach and content on the assigned topic.
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Like birds in a cage, there exist in our world people who understand that there is more to life than the self-imposed cage of their daily existence - invalids too ill to travel, office workers whose cubicle might as well be a second home, and factory workers whose world condenses to the square foot directly in front of them. They catch glimpses of freedom each day just outside the window, and they feel it on the breeze as the door swings shut to close them in. Their hearts beat with longing for it, echoed in the music of the world around them, and they surround themselves with visual reminders that carry all the bittersweet poignancy of a poet’s heartfelt words. Rather than relegating poems to “just a reminder of a different age”, people seek inspiration in the old words in desperate hope of escaping their personal cage. As a soulful song of lost freedoms, Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy” is a relevant reminder for today’s readers to fill every moment they can with “life fully lived and all joys fulfilled”.
In the manner of well-crafted song lyrics, Mr. Dunbar’s poem has a distinct meter and rhyming scheme that lends itself easily to spoken performance. The A-B-A-A-B-C-C pattern for each stanza draws the listener’s attention to the relationship of each spoken thought, and the cadence of each line has a distinct rhythm that leads easily from one phrase to the next, much like the gospels of his time and the Rhythm and Blues (R&B) standards of today. The words used are simple in both concept and meaning, with no word more than two syllables, so the joy of listening is not disrupted by the task of understanding. It is easy to imagine this poem set to music, with any number of popular artists today crooning it as a gentle whisper of things too important to forget or belting it out torch-style as a passionate reminder of daily joys unexpectedly lost or stolen away.
Beyond the basic structure of Mr. Dunbar’s poem, his careful wording delivers the message with powerfully evocative symbolism. He speaks first of what a caged bird must feel as it observes the world move outside its reach, of the impotent rage it must feel and, finally, why it sings such a doleful tune. In the first stanza, Mr. Dunbar invokes words of gentle movement, of life external to the cage, as relevant to the restrictions of racial oppression in his own time – or the personal restrictions of dealing with a terminal illness – as it is to the work-related “cages” of life today. People today “beat their wings” just as surely as the bird in the poem, railing against the daily-grind mindset by “taking a mental health day” or browsing the World Wide Web while on the clock, looking always for some way to distract their mind from the work-a-day prison of their own making. When the frustration of endless distraction with no true creative outlet becomes too much to bear in silence, these same people give voice to the frustration via online blogs and journals (such as the “Twitter bird” of internet fame).
Unlike the digital white noise of the internet, however, Mr. Dunbar’s poem is the very personal cry of a single voice raised with desperate hope to find a way free of the cage. Whether that voice is attributed to the Amistad mutineers as they awaited sentencing, whether that voice sings its grief alone as a newly paralyzed veteran of wars too numerous to name, or whether the drunken melancholy of middle-aged men singing about the glory days of youth, the mourning of personal freedom is an intensely personal thing. Much like the swan song of legend, the hauntingly beautiful dirge that denies being voiced until life’s end, the bird cannot trill with passionate regret for something still easily within its grasp; it requires the experience of being caged, of having its freedom stripped away forever, for the caged bird’s song to ring true for all who hear it.
“Sympathy”, then, is a most apt name for this poem, as it serves to draw the reader’s attention to the pretty bird in the gilded cage. With devout hope that the reader will sympathize with the caged bird’s plight, Dunbar’s poem exhorts his readers to see freedom as precious; he encourages them to avoid the same sorrowful entrapment that prompts the caged bird to sing. In recording this poem for posterity, Mr. Dunbar has given readers not only a concise snapshot of a single moment of his own lifetime, but a timely reminder to take time outside their own self-imposed cages and accomplish all the myriad things that bring them true peace and inner joy.
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