The poem is an extended metaphor involving birds, but Angelou uses other metaphors that add layers to the poem’s fundamental analogy. For example, Angelou uses metaphors in the first stanza to represent the wind. The bird rides “on the back of the wind” (Line 2). This line personifies the wind and provides a concrete image to emphasize the free bird’s harmony with the natural world.

Angelou introduces another metaphor right after this, saying the bird “floats downstream / till the current ends / and dips his wing / in the orange sun rays” (Lines 3-6). Here, Angelou compares the wind and the sun to a body of water. The bird floats down the wind’s stream and dips his wing in the sun’s water. Like the free bird and the wind, the water is free to move and flow along a natural course.

In stanza five, Angelou says the bird “stands on the grave of dreams / his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream” (Lines 27-28). The metaphor here is less concrete but more emotionally powerful than the metaphors in the first stanza. The “grave of dreams” implies that captivity represents a loss of one’s dreams for life.