Sympathy Literary Elements

First person point of view from a narrator familiar with the perspective of someone who has experienced what the lack of freedom feels like.

“Sympathy” is a lyric poem written in iambic tetrameter composed of three stanzas. The first and third stanzas have a rhyme scheme of ABAABCC. The second stanza features a slightly altered rhyme scheme: ABAABAA.

The poem features a controlling metaphor that runs throughout the verse in which the caged bird represents any and all humans being held in bondage. An isolated simile within the verse compares a river stream of glass.

"When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars”

is a subtle example of alliteration in which the repetition of "B" words not only underline the imagery of the pain experienced by the bird, but uses a consonant which is one of the earliest letters most children learn to articulate because it has a short stop, which in this case is highly suggestive of imprison or lack of freedom. There is no definite use of assonance of in the rhyme.

The reason for the bird singing his song is a slight example of tragic irony.

A lyric poem of social protest.

Indeterminate/Contemporary/Not germane

The tone varies with each stanza, starting out rather wistful before becoming angry and ending on a note of hope. What is most important about the tone is how it is the element most directly related to the title. Throughout, the speaker expresses a sympathetic identification with the caged bird.

These are literary elements which exist purely in the abstract within the poem. There is no literal “hero” or “villain” to correspond with these descriptions, but the protagonist would be identified as the speaker and the bird while the antagonist is the concept of bondage which here would most substantially be identified as the abstract owner of the bird kept in a cage.

Man versus society in the form of freedom versus bondage.

The climax of the poem is, unusually, not the result of the conflict, but rather the answer to the question implicit in the repetition of the speaker’s assertion of knowledge. Why does the caged bird feel, why does he beat his wing and why does he sing? Because he is praying for release from bondage. The climax is actually the revelation that what is taken to be a happy sound is just the opposite.

A very subtle foreshadowing is provided in the line “And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—” with its imagery of perfume making an escape from the flower. That image is then immediately broken off with the insertion of the dash almost as if the thought itself was also trying to make an escape and then quickly captured and caged.

An argument can be made that the entire conceit of the poem represents understatement by situating a small bird in a tiny cage as a metaphor for the concept of the African-American experience of being in held in bondage to systemic racism.

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The bird’s song being a pleas to heaven endows him with human elements of consciousness.

Although it might technically be argued that a person knowing how a bird feels or what it is thinking is an example of hyperbole--an overstatement of the facts--in this case the assertion is part of the controlling metaphor and is absent the element of humor or irony that is usually required for hyperbole.

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