Dunbar was often called the Negro Poet Laureate at the beginning of the twentieth century, but by the 1950s he was seen as an embarrassment to many readers because his dialect poems called up plantation stereotypes of African Americans. In his day, white readers embraced his dialect poems (‘‘The Party,’’‘‘When Malindy Sings’’) as the authentic…
Tag: Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Sympathy by Paul Lawrence Dunbar – Themes
Racism The central metaphor of the caged bird in ‘‘Sympathy,’’ with the bird forced to perform within confinement, could be taken as suggesting the slavery African Americans endured in the United States for two and a half centuries. Though Dunbar lived after the emancipation, the legacy of slavery continued through various social, legal, and psychological…
Sympathy by Paul Lawrence Dunbar – Summary – Meaning
Stanza 1 LINES 1–3 ‘‘Sympathy’’ is a lyric in iambic tetrameter, seven line stanzas of four metric feet per line. The last line of each stanza is shorter, with three feet. The first line establishes the poem’s controlling metaphor of the caged bird looking at a spring day, which mirrors the speaker’s situation. The speaker…