4.3: Paul Lawerence Dunbar's "Sympathy"

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Directions

Here, you will find Paul Lawerence Dunbar's "Sympathy"

The poems are on a docx. file. I recommend either printing it our or annotating the digital copy on your computer, or taking notes on the story on a separate piece of paper.

Author's Bio:

While schools, community centers, literary prizes, and other institutions carry Paul Laurence Dunbar’s name, his reputation has suffered from critics labeling him an accomidationist who rather than opposing white-supremacy and racism reinforced it with stereotypical images of African American characters who spoke in dialect and appeared to long for a bygone past in the Old South. Critics such as Charles T. Davis and Sterling A. Brown noted a sign of literary genius in Dunbar; however, they also saw Dunbar “misreading” African American history and culture. Dunbar came of age and wrote during the period of regionalism and the plantation tradition, a literary genre deployed by authors such as Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris that reinforced racist stereotypes of African Americans.

Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature

Links to an external site. by Matthew Teutsch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Links to an external site., except where otherwise noted.

While reading the poem, keep these questions/ideas in mind:

While reading this poem, reflect on what type of theme or message that jumps out to you?
List the themes
Then, begin to note and list the different use of poetic and literary devices in the poem
What about these devices makes you feel this way?
What does the poem mean to you??
This poem uses the line "I know why the caged bird sings" a lot. Is this an allusion? A symbol? All of the above?
How did the use of rhyme contribute/not contribute to the overall theme of the piece?
Did you like the poem? Why or why not?

Essay Topic

As a reminder, your essay topic is:

Do a close read of the poem. What is one overall theme/message that you see in the text? What are the literary/poetic devices that you see that are enhancing said theme/message?

"Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar.docx

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Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature

Links to an external site. by Matthew Teutsch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Links to an external site., except where otherwise noted.