This is the first installment of Ms. Angelou's serial autobiography. She lifts a line from Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem, "Sympathy" for the title of her book. Abandoned by her parents who acted more like children, raised by her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, and raped by one of her mother's boy friends, Maya Angelou knows from whence she speaks. Despite all of her trials and tribulations she has done as the protagonist of Ellison's "Invisible Man" asserts, "taken the blues and made poetry" out of her sufferings and joys. This is a touching and inspiring book.Here is Dunbar's poem:
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!

The "caged bird" is a metaphor for racial minorities, especially blacks; it is also a metaphor for the artists in society. Just as the oyster makes a pearl out of the grain of sand that irritates it, the artist creates art out of his or her life experiences.