Maya Angelou Caged Bird

Home is many things, for it can vary from the place where someone lives or even just a plain meaning that is different for everyone. In many cases, the thought of home is where people believe they belong. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the story of a girl named Marguerite Johnson and her life from an early age to her passage through adolescence to finally her young adult stage. Throughout her early life, she moves from home to home, two important ones being Stamps, Arkansas, and San Francisco, California. During her time in these two locations, there is an overwhelming amount of symbolization pondering the idea of belonging and where eden and exile is for her. At first, she does not know where she belongs, if she does belong

Maya Angelou talks about a caged bird and a free bird in her poem “Caged Bird.” When Maya Angelou talks about a caged bird and a free bird I think she is describing people, like the caged bird is a person who is stuck by others opinions about him/her and

Maya Angelou and Paul Larence Dunbar were African- American, who grew up in that era so they experienced and felt the sadness and pain that Africa-Americans when they became slaves for White people received at that time. From the same feeling, the same inspiration, the poems express their feeling when they used to face with that discrimination in their life every single day. The poems also assert the importance of freedom and its value in life. Besides the coincidence of the subject and circumstances of the birth of these two poems, there is another interesting similiar thing is that the image of a bird which is trapped in a cage is used as a metaphor to symbolize African -Americans who suffered racial discrimination during this period.

At some point in their life, every person struggles with an issue that cannot simply be resolved, but instead has to learn to be accepted and used to help one grow. In Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya learns to overcome many struggles she is faced with growing up, especially as a minority in the United States during the 1930’s-1940’s. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried tells of his struggles prior to, during, and after serving in the Vietnam War. Each author uses both internal and external conflict in their protagonists to portray their character’s struggles and help readers gain an understanding of not only the leads, but also perhaps themselves.

Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya shields herself against the confusion of St. Louis by reading fairy-tales and telling herself that she does not intend on staying there anyway. Vivian works in a gambling parlor at night. Maya pities Mr. Freeman because he spends his days at home waiting for Vivian to return. Maya begins sleeping at night with Vivian and Mr. Freeman because she suffers from nightmares. One morning after Vivian has left the bed and the house,

To be caged represents to be isolated mentally or even physically by which someone or something is held back against something else. In both poems, sympathy and caged bird, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Maya Angelou portray a bird in a cage which both hope for freedom. These two poems both have a similar purpose of proving that there can still be hope in the harshest times. While both poem’s sympathy and caged bird, both contained hope Caged bird was more meaningful because it showed more hope even though the bird was more blighted and isolated than the bird in sympathy.

Maya Angelou poem’s “Caged Bird” is a comparison between the lives of two bird. The free bird is able to live his life freely chasing worms while the caged bird can only sing for freedom. In Beloved, the characters that escape from slavery transform from a caged bird to a free bird. Although, they are free, the memory of the past continues to torment them.

Thesis Statement: Maya Angelou’s poem, “Caged Bird,” demonstrates her emotional stress of grief and desire for freedom, which stems from her personal struggle as an African American woman and from the viewpoints of her peers. She chose to write about her thoughts through beautiful poetry which related to her past dealing with racism, sexuality, and separation. “Like an unfinished painting, the autobiographical series is an ongoing creation, in a form that rejects the finality of a restricting frame. Its continuity is achieved through characters who enter the picture, leave, and reappear, and through certain interlaced themes-self-acceptance, race, men, work, separation, sexuality, motherhood” (Lupton 257).

The mood of “Caged Bird” changes drastically from stanza to stanza. Angelou’s specific diction choices help to reflect the change from being positive to negative with some elements of hope involved. The parts of the poem involving the free bird provide the reader with a feeling of self government.In contrast, the mood associated with the caged bird is confinment. Despite the negative mood tied to the caged bird there are still elements of hope woven into these stanzas.

In the poem, “Caged Bird”, Maya Angelou, utilizes the literary devices of personification, metaphor, and juxtaposition to emphasize the inhumane life of the caged bird and its search of freedom. Maya uses personification to describe the painful situation of the caged bird and its lack of freedom. She writes that “His shadow shouts on a nightmare scream”. This line dramatizes the condition of the cage bird, and giving the reader an unsettlement feeling of someone screaming in pain.

In Maya Angelou’s famous poem “I Know Why The Caged Bird sings” a really great woman that survived The Great Depression and lots of wars. She was an incredible african american woman, it was really hard for her to survive those wars because not only she was a woman but because she was a “Black” woman. Back then mostly everybody was racist to blacks, that’s probably the reason she made the poem “I know why the caged bird sings”. The caged bird connects with the main character Odessa, it connects with her because she is a black woman and she was stuck back when they had the civil rights movements. She was also there when the bus boycott had began, it also connects because she was a maid and the family she worked for did not like her at all because she was black.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is a novel by Maya Angelou, where she writes about her childhood and her experiences while growing up. This non-fiction novel illustrates Maya Angelou’s childhood, being tossed around by her parents, and having to experience different cultures. Maya struggles particularly in finding friends, she is reserved, and will only open up to Bailey, her brother. Maya moves a couple of times to different places, which may contribute to her not having friends. The novel revolves around Maya Angelou, Bailey, and her grandmother, evolving through life from being a child to a teenager. This novel is set in the “South”, in America.

The feeling of displacement leaves a painful hole in one's heart. Whether a person is a male or female, white or black, lives in the North or South, or young or old, displacement takes a toll on their character and personality. Maya Angelou creates a theme of displacement in her novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Angelou's novel has been critiqued by many notable scholars for being a classic autobiography. The critics note the importance of the setting to show universal displacement and the use of characterization to display the influences in Angelou's life. The critics also note that Angelou's diction and tone allow her pain and suffering to be evident throughout her novel and into her life. Angelou's use of setting shows how she was personally affected by displacement. She also uses characterization and tone to personalize her childhood experiences. Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is critiqued to have a theme of displacement based on the setting, characterization, and tone.

In her poem, Angelou uses contrasting tones to describe a free bird and a caged bird, analogous to a free man and an oppressed man. She writes that the free bird “names the sky his own” (Line 26) and that “a free bird leaps/on the back of wind/and floats downstream” (Lines 1-3). Angelou sets up her analogy by portraying the idyllic life the free bird lives, as it floats from one breeze to another, and has near-infinite resources. When discussing the free bird, Angelou uses terms

However, in the poem “Caged Bird” Maya Angelou characterizes the free and caged bird as, one bird symbolizing imprisonment and limitations while the other symbolizes freedom, which further develops the theme of inequality. The line “And dares to claim the sky” shows how unaware the free bird is and further develops the idea of its freedom. This piece of evidence shows how unaware the free bird is by exaggerating the extent of its freedom compared to the caged bird. In