Sympathy
A lyric poem of three seven-line stanzas, each opening and closing on a line about a caged bird. The stanzas move in turn to what the bird feels, why it beats its wing, and why it sings.
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872, in Dayton, Ohio, to Joshua and Matilda Dunbar, who had both been enslaved in Kentucky before the Civil War.[2] He was the only Black student in his Dayton high school class, where he edited the school paper and served as class poet, and he was among the first African American writers to gain a national and international readership.[2] "Sympathy" was first published in 1899 in his collection Lyrics of the Hearthside; his wife, the writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson, later recalled that the iron grating of the book stacks at the Library of Congress, where he worked in 1897, prompted the caged-bird image.[1] Dunbar died of tuberculosis on February 9, 1906, at the age of thirty-three.[2]
The Goldfinch
A small upright panel showing a European goldfinch perched on the top ring of a wall-mounted feeder box, a thin chain running from a shackle on its leg. The bird is set against a pale, whitewashed wall painted in visible strokes, with a single yellow feather in the dark wing.
The panel is signed and dated at lower center, "C FABRITIVS 1654," and measures 33.5 by 22.8 centimeters.[1] Carel Fabritius was born in 1622 in Middenbeemster, in the province of North Holland, and trained in Rembrandt's Amsterdam studio in the early 1640s before settling in Delft, where he joined the painters' Guild of Saint Luke in 1652.[2] On October 12, 1654, the Delft gunpowder magazine exploded, destroying much of the town and killing Fabritius in his studio at the age of thirty-two; only about a dozen of his paintings survive.[2] The Goldfinch, painted in the year of his death, entered the Mauritshuis collection in The Hague, where it carries inventory number 605.[1]
Snowy Owl (The Birds of America, Plate CXXI)
A hand-colored print showing two white snowy owls perched on the bare limbs of a dead tree against a dark ground, their plumage flecked with fine black barring. One owl faces forward with round yellow eyes; the other looks off to the side.
The plate belongs to John James Audubon's The Birds of America, issued in London and Edinburgh in sections between 1827 and 1838 in the large "Double Elephant" folio format, with 435 hand-colored plates sold to subscribers.[2] Audubon (1785–1851) drew the birds from specimens he had collected; the London engraver Robert Havell Jr. transferred the designs to copper and oversaw their hand coloring, and the finished sheets bear his name after Audubon's.[1] This impression of the Snowy Owl, dated 1831, is held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington as an open-access object numbered 32262.[1]
- National Gallery of Art collection page for Snowy Owl (Robert Havell after Audubon, 1831, object 32262) — maker, date, medium, source in The Birds of America.
- Wikipedia, "The Birds of America" — 1827–1838 publication in sections, Double Elephant folio, 435 plates, engraving by Robert Havell Jr., subscription sales.