I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

   

 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of seven autobiographical works by American writer Maya Angelou, published in 1969. The book chronicles her life from age 3 through age 16, recounting an unsettled and sometimes traumatic childhood that included rape and racism.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings covers tough issues such as the effects of rape and the trauma resulting from abuse; sexual development and gender issues; identity; and the impact of relationships between family members, friends, teachers, and students.

The poem describes the opposing experiences between two birds: one bird is able to live in nature as it pleases, while a different caged bird suffers in captivity. The latter bird sings both to cope with its circumstances and to express its own longing for freedom.

Maya Angelou's 'Caged Bird' strongly evokes the message of protest about the inequality between Blacks and Whites during Segregation in American history. It echoes the emotion within such a horrible experience, and it illustrates the oppression of the Blacks in contrast with the freedom of the Whites.

The predominant theme of the poem is freedom. The first line depicts this by introducing "the free bird." And the opposite theme is "slavery." A caged bird in captivity "sings of freedom." The caged bird was created for freedom as a free bird. Nonetheless, it is in an unnatural situation, trapped in a cage.

 The speaker of the poem ''Caged Bird'' is neither the caged bird nor the free bird, but rather someone who has come from an experience of oppression and is able to understand the stark differences between the two birds.

Angelou's poem is not strictly in free verse, because she utilises rhyme at various points, and there is the ghost of a metre behind her lines. For example, the stanzas beginning 'The caged bird sings' are largely written in iambic dimeter, which involves two iambs per line.

The mood of the text is both tense and nostalgic. As she looks at her past, the narrator is sometimes frightened, sometimes amused, and sometimes sad. She peppers her narration with adult commentary on the tragedy of being a confused child.

Read the full poem below :