Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was a groundbreaking Black poet who left his mark on American literature in the years between Reconstruction (the period during which the United States attempted to recover from the Civil War and integrate Black citizens) and the Harlem Renaissance, an upswell of Black poetry and art in the early 1910s through the 1930s.

During his lifetime, Dunbar was most famous for his poems that used African American Vernacular English (AAVE, language intended to represent the spoken language of Black Americans during the period). Alongside these poems in AAVE are lyrical poems like “Sympathy,” which relies on literary, standardized American English for its diction, or word choice. Originally published in 1899 in the collection Lyrics of the Hearthside, “Sympathy” frequently appears in anthologies because it so clearly articulates the experience of Black Americans struggling in a racially hostile culture in the years after the Civil War.

Poet Biography

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872, in Dayton, Ohio; his parents were formerly enslaved people. Dunbar was a precocious child and teen who began writing poetry early on, with his first poem, “Our Martyred Soldiers,” appearing during his high school years (Powell, Lisa. “Dayton’s Paul Laurence Dunbar to Be Remembered Friday.” 2019. Dayton Daily News). He published this poem and other works in a student paper that he edited with classmate Orville Wright, later famed for his inventions in air travel.

Dunbar’s family was unable to pay for a college education. Because of racial prejudice, Dunbar also struggled to find work. Dunbar eventually secured a job as an elevator operator, and the intermittent nature of the work allowed him to write the poems that later made him famous. His work brought him to the attention of important American literary figures, including poet James Whitcombe Riley. With the support of Riley and Orville Wright, Dunbar published the collection Oak and Ivy (1893), a mix of poems in AAVE and standardized, literary English, many of which featured sympathetic portrayals of Black life and the plight of Black Americans whose opportunities were limited as a result of racism.

Using the proceeds from sales of his collection and financial support from well-wishers, Dunbar published Majors and Minors (1895). Influential American editor and writer Willian Dean Howells gave his work positive (if racially condescending) reviews that helped Dunbar gain an international audience as a writer. Dunbar published Lyrics of Lowly Life in 1896, primarily a compilation of his first two collections, and Howells wrote the introduction to the work. Among the works in these collections are “We Wear the Mask,” a poem about Black Americans masking their discontent as a defense against racism, and more poems in AAVE, including “When Malindy Sings.”

Dunbar toured abroad and collaborated with Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor on the operetta Dream Lovers (1898). Back in the United States, Dunbar secured work as a clerk in the Library of Congress and married fellow poet Alice Dunbar-Nelson during the late 1890s; the marriage ended in 1902 due to Dunbar’s abuse of his wife. In the waning years of the 1800s, Dunbar published prolifically in a variety of genres, including the poetry collection Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899) and his novel The Uncalled (1898); he also published Sport of the Gods (1902), a novel about the impact of racism on a Black family. Dunbar struggled to find publishers for work other than his poems in AAVE.

By the early 1900s, Dunbar’s health rapidly deteriorated due to alcohol use and tuberculosis. By the age of 33, he had published 18 poetry collections, nine volumes of short and long fiction, and numerous works in other genres. Dunbar died in 1906, at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance (“Paul Laurence Dunbar.” 2023. Poetry Foundation).

Poem Text

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!

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “Sympathy.” 1899. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

In the first stanza, the speaker opens with a declaration of their understanding of what it feels like to be a bird in a cage. The caged bird feels the sun, hears the wind, sees the river, and smells flowers blooming. The bird is trapped in a cage, and the closeness to a free life is deeply painful. Like the bird, the speaker knows that they are close to freedom but unable to have it.

In the second stanza, the speaker says they understand why a bird that knows it cannot escape still beats against the bars of its cage until it injures itself, drawing blood and causing old wounds from previous attempts to throb. The bird does this over and over before finally returning to its perch—despite greatly preferring an outside “bough,” or tree branch—because that is as close as the bird can get to freedom. Like the bird, the speaker understands the painful, desperate, and futile struggle to escape oppression and confinement.

In the final stanza, the speaker notes that the caged bird still sings, no matter the wounds it has. But the song is not joyous, and it’s hardly even a song at all. It is instead a “prayer” or a “plea”—all the bird has to express its sense of being trapped and its fervent desire to be free. The speaker identifies with the bird’s longing for freedom—relying on lyrical language, the song of a poet, to express what they cannot have.