38 pages • 1 hour read
Maya AngelouCaged Bird
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Freedom and Imprisonment
The poem’s main message is about the difference between freedom and captivity. Again, it is important to understand that the poem does not specify the reasons for this freedom or captivity; the poem is a universal expression of these two states of being.
In the poem, freedom is movement, life, energy, warmth, openness, and nature. The poem opens not just with a free bird, but with a free bird who is taking action. Angelou uses active verbs to show this: The bird leaps, floats, dips, dares, and claims.
The free bird uses nature for his own devices. He uses the wind, trees, and bugs to sustain himself. Because of his ability to use nature for its own well-being, the bird claims dominion over nature, similar to how God gives Adam dominion over nature in the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible.
This free bird also experiences the vibrancy of life. Angelou personifies the wind, as it has a back upon which the bird can ride. She also compares the wind to the powerful rushing waters, as the bird “floats downstream / till the [wind’s] current ends” (Lines 3-4). The “orange sun rays” (Line 6) also energize the bird.
The second time Angelou describes the free bird in the fourth stanza, the bird again is free to engage with the breeze and all the aspects of nature he connects with, including the trees and the worms that he will eat. This bird is experiencing life from a position of power and privilege.
However, the free bird only exists in opposition to the caged bird. The caged bird does not leap and float, he stalks. Instead of inhabiting the open sky, he lives within a narrow cage. He cannot spread his wings, for they are clipped; he cannot walk, for his feet are bound. He cannot claim the sky because he does not know the sky.
The caged bird has no power or privilege, so all he can do is sing about what he dreams of. His songs are powerful, though, and even in the midst of all his suffering, he continues to sing, hoping to one day gain freedom.
The Power of Voice
Without the caged bird’s ability to sing, this poem would be devoid of any hope. The one thing that gives the caged bird a sense of hope is its ability to sing about what it desires. Angelou is careful to save the image of the caged bird singing for the end of stanzas two, three, five, and six. These are the stanzas about the caged bird, and they act as responses to the easy freedom she describes in stanzas one and four. Because the act of singing always comes last in the caged bird’s stanzas, the image Angelou leaves in the reader’s mind is one of hopefulness. It’s not that the captivity has defeated the bird’s hope; the bird’s hope rises above its captivity.
The imagery in this poem lends itself to the civil rights movement that Angelou participated in. Oftentimes, marchers in protests would link arms and sing in the face of opposition and hatred. The singing was both a form of social unity and a sign of power over their oppressors.
This is a very modern idea. It’s the idea of the individual voice’s power to overcome all physical roadblocks. This can be traced to the concept of freedom of speech from the American Constitution and the rise of individualism in western philosophy and art throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Readers might even be familiar with this concept as expressed by the classic aphorism “the pen is mightier than the sword.”
A voice carries. It lives a life external of the person who sings. Whether others hear that voice through song or on the page, the voice gives life to ideas and feelings that otherwise would live and die in the person’s head. A voice creates the possibility of empathy, sympathy, and connection. Angelou, as someone who found her voice through literature, understands the power of this gift, and her poem expresses it directly.
Complicity
Angelou is careful not to demonize the free bird for its freedom. The free bird lives an ideal life full of autonomy, power, and action.
The free bird’s sin, though, is its complicity. This complicity comes through in the interaction between the end of the third stanza and the beginning of the fourth stanza. Angelou shows that the bird’s song “is heard / on the distant hill” (Lines 19-20). The song doesn’t just carry across the hills; it is heard. However, the only other character in the poem who could hear the song, the free bird, ignores it. Right after the caged bird’s song is heard, “[t]he free bird thinks of another breeze” (Line 23).
Angelou uses some stylistic cues in this section to heighten the criminality of this apathy on the free bird’s part. She ends the third stanza with “freedom” and then uses “free” as the second word in the next stanza. This creates a direct contrast between the two birds’ situations and makes the free bird’s apathy even more appalling. She also rhymes the word “freedom” (Line 22) with “breeze” (Line 23). This makes it even more apparent that the free bird is aware of the caged bird’s situation. The rhyme makes it feel like an example of cognitive dissonance or psychological suppression where the free bird is aware of something he knows is wrong, yet he turns a blind eye and focuses on something he likes instead—something that hides the tension of reality.
This implies that the bird is only caged because of the free bird’s refusal to help. Even though the free bird might not be the one who imprisoned the caged bird, the free bird is doing nothing to rectify the situation, empathize with the caged bird, or show solidarity with the caged bird. This makes the free bird complicit, much like how Angelou and other civil rights advocates viewed the majority of Americans who were not outwardly, blatantly racist, but who refused to show the support, sacrifice, and solidarity required to bring about true equality and justice for Black Americans.
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