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“Caged Bird” doesn’t have an obvious concrete setting. Instead, the poem introduces a comparison between two abstract spaces: the “space” of freedom and the “space” of confinement. On the one hand, the speaker associates the space of freedom with the sky. They indicate as much in the opening stanza, where they describe how “a free bird leaps / on the back of the wind / and floats downstream” (lines 1–3). The speaker returns to the sky as the space of freedom three stanzas later, where the same free bird “names the sky his own” (line 26). By contrast, the caged bird, who is both physically and psychologically constrained, is associated with the “space” of confinement. These opposed spaces of freedom and confinement are quite abstract. However, they also point to a more concrete context that’s implied in Angelou’s allusion to a poem by the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar’s poem uses the caged bird as a symbol for the unfreedom of Black people in the United States following abolition. Writing in the early 1980s, Angelou invokes this same figure to address Black Americans’ experience in the late twentieth century.

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