The focus of much analysis of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy” is on the symbolism of the bird trapped in the caged and how it serves as metaphor. This is to be expected since the imagery of the bird singing whistling its song even while trapped in bondage is open to a great deal of interpretation. The extremely personal can be read into as a poetic cry from Dunbar of falling into the trap of generic expectations: readers wanted his dialect stories and were resistant to an attempt to break out. Likewise, the image of the trapped bird also fulfills yet another conventional expectation: because Dunbar was black, it goes without question that the poem is making a statement about slavery and post-Reconstruction racism. What is often overlooked in the analysis is an essential component of its most notable rhetorical device.
“I know what the caged bird feels…I know why the caged bird beats his wings….I know why the caged bird sings.”
Such repetitious parallelism is never coincidental or meaningless when attempting to explicate a poem, especially such a short poem where every word matters, where every choice is invested with meaning. The pronoun here is empowered with as much significance and prominence as the bird in the cage. The poet is not merely informing the reader how the caged bird feels or why he beats his wings and sing. Through the decision to inform the reader he is subtly suggesting that such knowledge is not open to everyone. Not everyone can look at a bird in a cage and know how that the appearance is deceiving.
The suggestion makes the poet an informant; he is privy to a secret not know to everyone. Even more to the point: he is privy to a secret that is right there out in the open for everyone to see and yet everyone does not see. What many people see when they look at a bird in a cage that is singing is a bird that is expressing its natural state of being. Birds sing in the wild and birds sing in cages; therefore the song remains the same. They lack the necessary experience to intuit that nature is being corrupted. A bird in a cage—no matter what its song may sound like—is a creature denied the natural state of freedom.
When the poet says that he knows why the caged bird sings and how it feels he is saying that he is privy to this intuition through experience. The experience of denial of the natural state of freedom is not a state of being limited to racial boundaries or the life on artist. Some people grow up in this world with the supposed freedom to become anything or do anything they want severely curtailed by impositions upon that freedom. Others who have not only ever experienced these limitations themselves, but grow up in a world insulated from even being among people experiencing those limitations are not afforded to experience to allow them intuit. There is a word for this experience allowing for intuition of knowing how a caged bird feels and why it sings. The speaker has it. Those who hear a caged bird’s song and assume it is as happy as a bird free to soar unencumbered through the air do not. Interestingly enough, it is a word that sounds very much like the title of the poem: empathy.
