Dunbar: Sympathy

[은밤]

 

Sympathy

                     - Paul Laurence Dunbar

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!

-----

* 1연 5행: ope = open (시어)

* 1연 6행: chalice = 성배; 잔, 잔 모양의 꽃 (시어)

* 1연 6행: steal = vi. 어느새 (깨닫지 못하는 새) 무슨 일인가 일어나는 것을 의미.

* 2연 4행: fain = 기꺼이 (glad)

* 2연 5행: throb = 고동치다, 맥박치다. 고통이 반복적으로 올 때도 사용.

Phillis라는 여인은 미국 흑인으로서 처음으로 시집(1773년)을 낸 사람인데,

Dunbar는 그 이후 처음으로 인정을 받은 흑인 시인입니다. 무려 120-130년 후의

일이었습니다.

시가 어렵지 않아서 내용은 용이하게 파악될 것입니다. 시의 평가는 각자

내려 보기 바랍니다.

------

시 낭독: http://www.archive.org/details/sympathy_librivox

------

"Sympathy" was written by Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1899, right at the end of the Nineteenth Century. It is a poem about the caged bird who wants to be free and tries, tries and tries again to break out of its cage. Each time, it is unable to break free and instead only injures itself, adding to injuries left over from past escapes. Dunbar depicts the bird's desperate and unsuccessful struggle for freedom and images of nature, that beckon outside. The first paragraph touches on the situation that black people faced at the turn of the century.

------

In “Sympathy”, Paul Laurence Dunbar relates the many problems in his life to the problems of an entrapped bird.  In the poem Dunbar shows the bird in the cage while wonderful things happen all around it.  He illustrates how the sun is bright and the wind is whispering softly, but the bird is unable to enjoy the beautiful weather due to its cage.  The difficulties he has encountered in life are shown in these lines: “And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars/ And they pulse again with a keener sting”. In this, the bird is not actually symbolizing Paul Laurence Dunbar, for he continues to claim how he can sympathize with the bird, yet it has his same problems, Dunbar’s cage being the racism that he constantly faced during his time period. In this point in his life, Dunbar was finding that it was impossible to find any job that could be considered meaningful or of importance, or any job that paid even averagely. He was an elevator boy at this point, and his main way of venting his frustration against a discriminatory world was through poetry. By using brilliant imagery and stinging emotion, Dunbar shows us how racism is imprisoning his soul.

------

Phillis 관련:

I was particularly moved by the account of the Wheatly family who purchased a sick little seven-year-old African slave in Boston Harbor, gave her a home, a name and an opportunity to become the person Christ had created her to be. This child, Phillis (1753-1784) had a gift for poetry. When she was a teenager, John Wheatly and his wife sent her to England to improve her health. There Phillis was received by the people called Methodists and befriended by the Countess of Huntingdon. Later the Countess helped Phillis publish her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (the first published book of poetry by an African American)

Phillis의 시들: http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/wheatley.html