For Maya Angelou: "The Caged Bird Sings" [by Hollis Robbins]

As we say farewell to Maya Angelou we should also note the genesis of the book she is most well known for, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
 
The line is of course from the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy” from Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899):
 
Sympathy  
 
I know what the caged bird feels.
Ah me, when the sun is bright on the upland slopes,
when the wind blows soft through the springing grass
and the river floats like a sheet of glass,
when the first bird sings and the first bud ops,
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 bow aswing.
And the blood 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 its wings are bruised and its bosom sore.
It beats its bars and would be free.
It’s not a carol of joy or glee,
but a prayer that it sends from its heart’s deep core,
a plea that upward to heaven it flings.
I know why the caged bird sings. 
 

Dunbar’s wife, the poet Alice Dunbar, wrote in 1914 that the cage was suggested to him by “the iron grating of the book stacks in the Library of Congress,”which

suggested to him the bars of the bird's cage. June and July days are hot. All out of doors called and the trees of the shaded streets of Washington were tantalizingly suggestive of his beloved streams and fields. The torrid sun poured its rays down into the courtyard of the library and heated the iron grilling of the book stacks until they were like prison bars in more senses than one. The dry dust of the dry books (ironic incongruity!—a poet shut up in an iron cage with medical works), rasped sharply in his hot throat, and he understood how the bird felt when it beat its wings against its cage.[1]

The genesis of the line in a library is appropriate: in the nineteenth century, the poetic trope of the caged bird singing was quite well known.  American poets who used the line include Lydia Sigourney, in a stanza from “Morn and Even” (from Pocahontas and Other Poems, 1841):
 
Morn to the watcher by the sick man's bed!
The slow, slow clock tells out the welcome hour,
And to the air he springs with buoyant tread;
The poor caged bird sings sweet in lady's bower;
The farmer, watchful lest the skies may lower,
Thrusts his sharp sickle mid the bearded grain;
While sportive voices, strong in childhood's power,
With merry music wake the village plain,
And toil comes forth refresh’d, and age is young again.
 
The New England novelist and poet Sarah Orne Jewett used the phrase as the title of an overtly feminist poem; “A Caged Bird” (1887), begins thus:
 
High at the window in her cage     
   The old canary flits and sings,
Nor sees across the curtain pass
   The shadow of a swallow’s wings.
 
A poor deceit and copy, this,
   Of larger lives that mark their span,
Unreckoning of wider worlds
   Or gifts that Heaven keeps for man….[2]
 
Other minor nineteenth century poets who published poems entitled “The Caged Bird” include Charles Dibdin, William Lisle Bowles, James Benjamin Kenyon, Adelaide Stout, and Esther T. Housh.  The poet John Lofland, known as “The Milford Bard,” was satirized by an unknown poet in 1839 (“Wholesome Advice”) after landing in jail for intemperance: “He practiced at the bar so long, / That bars are used to check him / The caged bird sings a pretty song, / Although his friends forsake him.” American poets William Reed Huntington and Henry Frank used the phrase “caged bird sings” in poems.
 
And of course, famously, Lord Byron uses the phrase “caged bird” in Canto IV of Don Juan:
 
Don Juan in his feminine disguise,
  With all the damsels in their long array,
Had bow’d themselves before th’ imperial eyes,
  And at the usual signal ta’en their way
Back to their chambers, those long galleries
  In the seraglio, where the ladies lay
Their delicate limbs; a thousand bosoms there
Beating for love, as the caged bird’s for air.
 
While the trope of the “caged bird” was common in the nineteenth century, the works of Dunbar and Angelou have now perhaps permanently associated the phrase “caged bird sings” with the experience of the African American poet.
 
[1] Daytona History Books Online. 
[2] The Atlantic Monthly, June, 1887

Hollis Robbins is Chair of the Humanities Department at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. Robbins holds a PhD in English from Princeton University (2003), an MPP from Harvard University (1990), and a BA in the Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins (1983).  She has edited four books on nineteenth-century African American literature, most recently the Penguin edition of Frances E.W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy. Her poetry has been published in The Cortland Review, Mezzo Cammin, Per Contra, Boston Literary Magazine, and Connotation Press.  She is currently writing a book on the African American sonnet tradition.

 

Comments

[DL]

Nicely done. And let's not forget "The Caged Skylark" of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The sonnet concludes:
Man’s spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best,
But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed
For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen