Confining Beauty

Humans tend to confine what they find beautiful under a dome for exploiting their beauty is often what matters and sells. Let there be plants or animals or even their fellow people, humankind is known for the “beauty sells” movement. To benefit from these things they deem beautiful, people capture these exotic beauties from their natural habitat and imprison them in a small place where they start to slowly suffocate. This has been happening for years from circuses to people’s gardens. When you put something that can flourish and bloom in their own space in a cage, they are doomed. Just because you find something beautiful does not mean you have the right to obtain that thing from its living space. Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther”, Marge Piercy’s “A Work of Artifice” and Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird” discuss three different cases where animals and plants were taken from their homes just for the enjoyment of humans and show the damage done to them by telling the story of their struggles whilst portraying what would have happened had they have just been left alone.  

Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther” depicts an image of a panther who is confined in a cage. The society that trapped this panther is cruel. This is his attempt at freedom. The cage’s bars symbolize his lack of freedom as he resists being tamed. By alienating this animal and confining it, they are invading its rights to freedom. As the panther’s vision slowly starts to get weary, he starts losing its abilities. The panther that was once captured for its beauty, starts losing its spark as it loses its hope for freedom. The poem also depicts the freedom struggle that was going on at the time with the building of the Berlin Wall.  

Similarly, Marge Piercy’s “A Work of Artifice” tells the story of another confined being. This time it’s a plant that could’ve been divine in nature had it been left alone. This poem portrays what limitations can do to a being. The poem’s last lines also depict that the plant can be read as a symbol for women who are trapped inside the walls society has built around them. From Chinese people binding the feet of their women, there are many struggles that women face in this poem that are told through a plant narrative. Through this bonsai tree imagery, the poet tells the story of oppressed women who must live up to society’s norms to fit in. It is also possible to see that in an ideal world, this bonsai tree would be left alone to expand at its own pace without being cut down to a petite image that is drawn for it, just like how the patriarchal society has built this image for women to adapt if they want to be socially acceptable.  

Just like Rilke’s “The Panther” has hints of the struggle around the time the Berlin Wall was built and Piercy’s “A Work of Artifice” discusses the oppression of women from different cultures through symbols, Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird” also touches on another important subject. The main character of this poem is a bird, and this bird is used to represent the black people who were enslaved for years. It talks about how these birds cannot reach their full potential or thrive because their feet have been bound which is similar to how slaves were treated by white people just because of the color of their skin. The bars in this cage represent a different thing, however. The bars this time stand for the rage that has been built up for years because of the way they were unfairly treated.