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Caged Bird and Shaker Why don't you sing

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Caged Bird and Shaker Why don't you sing

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In both of the pieces, a voice is being heard. A voice for hope and strength.

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the caged bird leads a life of confinement that sorely inhibits his need to fly and sing.

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The free bird floats leisurely on "trade winds soft through the sighing trees" and even "dares to claim the sky." He feeds on "fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn" and soars to "name the sky his own."

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Caged bird by Maya Angelou tells a story of a free bird and caged bird.

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“A Georgia Song,” for example, in its beautifully lyrical cadences, recalls the unforgotten memories of slavery, which linger like "odors of Southern cities" and the "great green / Smell of fresh sweat. / In Southern fields."

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The same determined voice comes through in a number of other poems that relate unabiding anguish over the oppression of the black race.

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"O Shaker, why don't you sing?" This mournful apostrophe to love serves as a refrain in an unsung song and, in its second utterance, brings the poem to a close unanswered.

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A woman, "evicted from sleep's mute palace" and lying awake alone in bed, remembers the "perfect harmonies" and the "insistent / rhythm" of a lost love.

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Her poems describe the loss of love.

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Similarly, in the very brief poem “Prelude to a Parting, ” a woman lying in bed beside her lover senses the imminent end when he draws away from her touch. Yet neither will acknowledge "the tacit fact" or face the "awful fear of losing," knowing, as they do without speaking, that nothing will "cause / a fleeing love / to stay."

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In many of these poems, a woman awakens at sunrise, with or without her lover by her side, wondering how much longer their dying relationship will limp along before its failure will be openly acknowledged. Which relates to her own relationships.

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More than half of the twenty-eight poems in Shaker concern the subject of love between woman and man, and of these, most deal with the pain, loss, and loneliness that typically characterize unrequited love.

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In “The Lie,” for example, a woman protects herself from humiliation when her lover threatens to leave her by holding back her anger and pretending to be unmoved, even eager to see her man go:

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She became a single mother after recently graduating high school.

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Maya Angelou was separated from her parents at the age of 3.