Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Sympathy" is a poem that describes the terrible experience of being a bird stuck in a cage, but the inference that can be best made is that this is a poem that's about more than a caged bird, it is about men and racism.
Explanation:
The main theme of “Sympathy” is Racism and the desire that like the bird the speaker would someday be freed and not held back, The poem is mostly about feeling trapped by your circumstances, but still fighting for what you deserve. It focus on the relationships of freedom and oppression, of an individual to an oppressive society (the bird to its cage), and of an artist to expression. According to its style, it can be say that the poem features repetition in the first and last lines of each stanza to emphasize the degree to which the speaker identifies with the caged bird. In this poem, valued language and poetry means artistic expression and protest against injustice.
