Caged Bird

For this activity, students will write a poem in response to another poem.

There is a popular trend in literature to write poems in response to other poems. Angelou responds to Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy.” Sir Walter Raleigh, in “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” responds to Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.”

• First, choose a poem you enjoy. Try to select one with strong imagery, such as the caged bird, or two characters, such as the shepherd and the nymph.
• Once you have selected a poem, consider who or what might respond to it and how.

o In what way might the response continue commentary on an issue such as oppression, as Angelou does?

o In what way might the response agree or disagree with the message of the first poem, as Raleigh imagines?

• Next, use the original poem as a model for writing, but feel free to be inventive. Use a first-person narrative voice and pick up where the first poem leaves off.

After writing a response, reflect on the theme and structure of the original poem. Are those represented in your poem in a similar way, or are they quite different? In your notes or a reading journal, reflect on the effectiveness of your response, and speculate how the writer of the poem you responded to might reply.