-Tim Keller

e above poem was published in Lyrics of the Hearthside by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1899. It was this poem that inspired the title to Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.

Another poem named Sympathy appeared in his first book, Oak and Ivy, that he distributed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

The tear another’s tears bring forth,
The sigh which answers sigh,
The pulse that beats at other’s woes,
E’en though our own be nigh,

A balm to bathe the wounded heart
Where sorrow’s hand hath lain,
The link divine from soul to soul
That makes us one in pain,—

Sweet sympathy, benignant ray,
Light of the soul doth shine;
In it is human nature giv’n
A touch of the divine.

                            Sympathy

    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 (1872-1906)

It seemed to me self-evident that one essential property of love, hate, fear, hope or desire was attention to their object. To cease thinking about or attending to the woman is, so far, to cease loving; to cease thinking about or attending to the dreaded thing is, so far, to cease being afraid. But to attend to your own love or fear is to cease attending to the loved or dreaded object. In other words, the enjoyment [i.e., experience] and contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning around to look at the hope itself. … This discovery flashed a new light back on my whole life. I saw that all my waiting and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, “This is it,” had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed [experienced]. 
Inexorably, Joy proclaimed, “You want – I myself am your want of – something other, outside, not you nor any state of you.” … I thus understood that in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, a commerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with any object of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or social need, or anything imagined, or any state of our own minds, proclaims itself sheerly objective.

who YOU will serve