Dunbar published “Sympathy” in a historical moment when American writers frequently represented Black Americans as happy or clueless collaborators in their own subordination. The white supremacist argument was that most Black Americans were content with their subordination, and that contentment was confirmation that inequality was simply part of the natural order of things. In “Sympathy,” Dunbar intervenes in this representation by using imagery from the natural world to show that there is nothing at all natural about oppression, and that Black Americans are resistant to white supremacist notions of order.

In “Sympathy,” there are two kinds of birds. There is “the first bird” (Line 5), who signals that dawn has come, and then there is “the caged bird” (Line 1), whose song is “a prayer” (Line 19) and “a plea” (Line 20). The presence of that other, first bird shows that a free-flying and singing bird is as natural as a shining sun or a “river [that] flows like a stream of glass” (Line 4). The image of the river as glass that has become molten underscores that nature dissolves all constraints. In contrast to the free flow of nature is the cage, composed of “cruel bars” (Line 9), and the “perch” (Line 10), which is what the “caged bird” (Line 8) has in place of a “bough a-swing” (Line 11).