Caged Bird

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1983

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Metaphor

The poem is an extended metaphor involving birds, but Angelou uses other metaphors that add layers to the poem’s fundamental analogy. For example, Angelou uses metaphors in the first stanza to represent the wind. The bird rides “on the back of the wind” (Line 2). This line personifies the wind and provides a concrete image to emphasize the free bird’s harmony with the natural world.

Angelou introduces another metaphor right after this, saying the bird “floats downstream / till the current ends / and dips his wing / in the orange sun rays” (Lines 3-6). Here, Angelou compares the wind and the sun to a body of water. The bird floats down the wind’s stream and dips his wing in the sun’s water. Like the free bird and the wind, the water is free to move and flow along a natural course.

In stanza five, Angelou says the bird “stands on the grave of dreams / his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream” (Lines 27-28). The metaphor here is less concrete but more emotionally powerful than the metaphors in the first stanza. The “grave of dreams” implies that captivity represents a loss of one’s dreams for life. Line 28 uses a complex image that inverts the image of the bird singing: While the bird sings of freedom and hope, his shadow reflects the suppression of pain and trauma, or the undercurrent of anger that accompanies all songs of those in captivity.

Rhyme and Repetition

While “Caged Bird” does not utilize a set rhyme scheme, it does contain a number of end rhymes and internal rhymes. The first stanza rhymes “leaps” (Line 1) with “stream,” which is part of the word “downstream” (Line 3). It also contains some internal and slant rhymes, including “wind” (Line 2)/“dips” (Line 5) and “rays” (Line 6)/“claim” (Line 7).

Stanza two end rhymes “cage” (Line 9)/“rage” (Line 11) but also uses the internal rhyme of “wings” (Line 12)/“sing” (Line 14).

Stanza four also has some interesting rhymes, including the end rhymes “breeze” (Line 23)/“trees” (Line 24) and the end slant rhyme “lawn” (Line 25)/“own” (Line 26). It also internally rhymes “dawn”/“lawn” (Line 25).

There are other rhymes throughout the poem as well, but the overall effect is musical. This is a free verse poem that contains end rhymes, internal rhymes, perfect rhymes, and slant rhymes. The combination of these different kinds of rhymes connects the poem without the obvious connection of a rhyme scheme. The seemingly scattered nature of the rhymes also mirrors the free and sporadic way birds fly up, down, and all around the sky.

In addition to the rhymes, the poem also uses repetition to great effect. Not only are stanzas three and six repeated to form a chorus, but the structure of lines and stanzas also repeats to highlight the contrast between the two birds. Every stanza, for example, starts with one of the following syntactic constructions: article/adjective/noun or conjunction/article/adjective/noun. In every stanza, the adjective is either “free” or “caged,” and the noun is always “bird.”

Form and Meter

“Caged Bird” is a free verse poem with no set rhythm, no rhyme scheme, and no consistent syllabic count. That said, the poem does tend to use iambs (a metrical foot containing an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable) and anapests (a metrical foot containing two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable) more than any other metrical foot, and though this repetition is fairly consistent, it’s not a set pattern. The first stanza illustrates this well:

A free / bird leaps – iambic

on the back / of the wind – anapestic

and floats / downstream – iambic

till the curr / ent ends — anapestic/iambic

and dips / his wing – iambic

in the or / ange sun rays – anapestic

and dares / to claim / the sky. – iambic

Angelou repeats this pattern in other parts of the poem, including stanza three:

The caged / bird sings – iambic

with a fear/ ful trill – anapestic/iambic

of things /unknown – iambic

but longed / for still – iambic

The repetition of these patterns makes the poem feel more like a song, but because the rhythm isn’t fully consistent, especially in the fourth and fifth stanzas, this poem retains its free verse structure.