The speaker of “Caged Bird” doesn’t reveal any details about themself, and as such they remain anonymous. That said, it’s evident that the speaker is someone who has personal experience with feelings of confinement and constraint. They could be having these feelings in the present moment, or they could be reflecting on past experiences. Alternatively, they could be thinking about other people they know who are struggling with similar feelings. The truth is, we just don’t know. All we know for sure is that the speaker sympathizes deeply with the caged bird at the heart of the poem. The speaker knows what it is to feel boxed in and to dream of freedom. Yet they also know that such oppressive conditions cannot strip anyone of all their agency. Thus, like the caged bird who sings sorrowful songs in the face of his confinement, the speaker engages with sorrow through the act of writing poetry.

Although their discussion of the free bird and the caged bird is rather abstract, it’s possible to infer some concrete details about the speaker’s identity. The key here lies with the caged bird and his sad song. This figure is an allusion to the poem “Sympathy” by the influential African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. For Dunbar, the caged bird stood as a powerful symbol for Black experience in the wake of slavery’s abolition. Though technically “free,” Black Americans remained socially, politically, economically, and even geographically constrained. With their freedom dreams still unrealized, Black artists and intellectuals channeled their frustrated hope into artistic acts and creative practice. Here, the sorrowful song of the caged bird is best understood in relation to the musical tradition of spirituals. Also known as “sorrow songs,” these spirituals emerged in the time of slavery, and in the post-abolition period this musical tradition developed further—first into the blues and, later, into jazz. These specific links to Dunbar’s poetry and the history of Black music strongly implies that the speaker is Black, and that their paradigm of constrained freedom relates directly to the U.S. context.

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