Lesson Notes By Weeks and Term - Senior Secondary School 1
THEMES, LANGUAGE AND STYLE INTHE POEM
THEMES, LANGUAGE AND STYLE INTHE POEM
SUBJECT: LITERATURE-IN-ENGLISH
CLASS: SS1
TERM: 2ND TERM
REFERENCES
WEEK NINE
THEMES, LANGUAGE AND STYLE INTHE POEM.
Maya confronts the insidious effects of racism and segregation in America at a very young age. She internalizes the idea that blond hair is beautiful and that she is a fat black girl trapped in a nightmare. Stamps, Arkansas, is so thoroughly segregated that as a child Maya does not quite believe that white people exist. As Maya gets older, she is confronted by more overt and personal incidents of racism, such as a white speaker’s condescending address at her eighth-grade graduation, her white boss’s insistence on calling her Mary, and a white dentist’s refusal to treat her. The importance of Joe Louis’s world championship boxing match to the black community reveals the dearth of publicly recognized African American heroes. It also demonstrates the desperate nature of the black community’s hope for vindication through the athletic triumph of one man. These unjust social realities confine and demean Maya and her relatives. She comes to learn how the pressures of living in a thoroughly racist society have profoundly shaped the character of her family members, and she strives to surmount them.
Maya is shuttled around to seven different homes between the ages of three and sixteen: from California to Stamps to St. Louis to Stamps to Los Angeles to Oakland to San Francisco to Los Angeles to San Francisco. As expressed in the poem she tries to recite on Easter, the statement “I didn’t come to stay” becomes her shield against the cold reality of her rootlessness. Besieged by the “tripartite crossfire” of racism, sexism, and power, young Maya is belittled and degraded at every turn, making her unable to put down her shield and feel comfortable staying in one place. When she is thirteen and moves to San Francisco with her mother, Bailey, and Daddy Clidell, she feels that she belongs somewhere for the first time. Maya identifies with the city as a town full of displaced people.
Maya’s personal displacement echoes the larger societal forces that displaced blacks all across the country. She realizes that thousands of other terrified black children made the same journey as she and Bailey, traveling on their own to newly affluent parents in northern cities, or back to southern towns when the North failed to supply the economic prosperity it had promised. African Americans descended from slaves who were displaced from their homes and homelands in Africa, and following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, blacks continued to struggle to find their place in a country still hostile to their heritage.
Black peoples’ resistance to racism takes many forms in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Momma maintains her dignity by seeing things realistically and keeping to herself. Big Bailey buys flashy clothes and drives a fancy car to proclaim his worth and runs around with women to assert his masculinity in the face of dehumanizing and emasculating racism. Daddy Clidell’s friends learn to use white peoples’ prejudice against them in elaborate and lucrative cons. Vivian’s family cultivates toughness and establishes connections to underground forces that deter any harassment. Maya first experiments with resistance when she breaks her white employer’s heirloom china. Her bravest act of defiance happens when she becomes the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Blacks also used the church as a venue of subversive resistance. At the revival, the preacher gives a thinly veiled sermon criticizing whites’ charity, and the community revels in the idea of white people burning in hell for their actions.
FORM
Angelou does not allow meter, rhyme, and stanza to control her poetry. She determines her own structure—or lack of it—and uses form and device for her own means; she searches for the sound, the tempo, the rhythm, and the rhyme appropriate for each line.
“Caged Bird” is an example of unstructured verse. The number of beats per line varies; for example, line 1 has four beats, line 2 has six, line 3 has four, and line 4 has five. The number of lines in each stanza fluctuates as well; stanzas 1 and 2 have seven lines each, but stanzas 3 and 4 have eight. In addition to her use of the intermittent stanza, Angelou repeats stanza 3 as stanza 5; this repetition is reminiscent of the chorus in a song. The only other structuring device that Angelou employs in the thirty-eight lines is sporadic rhyme. For instance, only lines 9 and 11 in the entire first two stanzas use rhyming words (“cage” and “rage”); in the fourth stanza only lines 30 and 31 rhyme (“breeze” and “trees”). The only other rhyming words that Angelou uses—and at her own discretion—are in the third stanza, which she repeats as stanza 5. She rhymes “trill” and “still” with “hill”; she also rhymes “heard” and “bird.”
The repetition of the third stanza gives some predictability to the poem and allows the reader to participate actively in the unpleasant plight of the caged bird. By contrast, other parts of the poem are unpredictable and at times even pleasurable; the joy of the free bird makes it possible for the reader to bear the tragic story of the oppressed...
Metaphor:
The poet uses metaphor (an indirect comparison) when she compares wind to water. The words ‘downstream’ and ‘current’ make us think of the tides in a sea or oceafloats downstream
till the current ends
Again, she uses metaphors in the use of two birds — “free bird” and “caged bird”. The free bird represents the privileged section of the society whereas the caged one signifies the underprivileged. Maya Angelou was an active participant in the African American Freedom Movement. That is why this poem is seen as an autobiographical representation of the condition she and her community was in. The slavery and segregation of the African Americans are compared to the condition of the caged bird and the free bird refers to the freedom enjoyed by the White Americans.
Alliteration:
Alliteration (repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of nearby words) is used in places like —can seldom see through (repetition of ‘s’ sound)
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
his shadow shouts on a nightmare screams
End Rhyme and Internal Rhyme:
End rhyme is used in the second, fourth and sixth lines of the third stanza — ‘trill’, ‘still’ and ‘hill’.
Internal rhyme is used in the fourth stanza — and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
Imagery:
Angelou uses vivid imageries. ‘Orange sun rays’, ‘distant hills’, fat worms’ etc are examples of visual imageries while ‘sighing trees’, ‘nightmare scream’ and ‘fearful trill’ are auditory imageries.
Personification:
The poet personifies (applied human characteristics) the two birds when she says —
‘dips his wing’, ‘dares to claim the sky’, ‘name the sky his own’, ‘opens his throat to sing’, ‘sings of freedom’ etc.
Repetition:
The poet repeats the third stanza later in the poem to emphasize the distressed condition of the downtrodden people.
Moreover, the use of contrast in the form of two birds in completely opposite situation and the use of moods in ‘fearful trill’ ‘nightmare scream’, ‘bright lawn’, ‘grave of dreams’ etc. also form literary devices
In the poem 'Caged Bird’, the poet Maya Angelou expresses her views on social injustice. The poem itself is an extended metaphor of two birds; one bird is 'caged’ while the other is 'free’, this is a metaphor towards slavery with the 'free bird’ representing whites and the 'caged bird’ representing blacks. It could also be argued, though, towards any example of social injustice. Angelou shows her views through the use of conjunctions, rhyme and use of diction. Together, these techniques give a clear contrast of the unfairness between the standards of the 'free bird’ and the 'caged bird’.
When describing the 'free bird’ Angelou starts lines with the conjunction 'and’; 'and floats downstream’, 'and dips his wings’. This repetition of 'and’ followed by what the 'free bird’ does shows the many choices and opportunities the 'free bird’ gets. The 'free bird’ is 'free’ to do as he pleases; he even 'dares to claim the sky’. This relates to social injustice as the 'caged bird’ 'sings of things unknown but longed for still’, as if the 'caged bird’ is deprived of the rights of the 'free bird’ to 'dip his wing’ or 'float downstream’. The use of this conjunction shows the many choices the 'free bird’ has and the injustice of the caged bird not getting these same opportunities.
In a repeated stanza (3 and 6) Angelou uses end rhyme to show the 'caged bird’s’ lust for freedom and to add emphasis to the fact that the 'caged bird’ does not get the same opportunities as the 'free bird’. Throughout stanza’s 5 and 6 Angelou uses a repeated rhyme pattern, 'trill…still…hill’, before on the last line of the stanza the word is a mismatched word, 'freedom’.
EVALUATION QUESTIONS
GENERAL EVALUATION/REVISON QUESTIONS
WEEKEND ASSIGNMENT
THEORY
Discuss the use of contrast in the poem above.
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