Speaker
The speaker is not identified in any specific way other than it is someone who is attending a zoo where animals are kept in cages to be put on display. In the absence of any defining characteristics suggesting otherwise, the anonymous nature of the speaker would lead one to logically assume the speaker is a manifestation of the poet himself. Thus, any knowledge of the poet’s background would be appropriately applied to the interpretation of the narrative perspective of the text.
What can be gleaned from the text is that the speaker is educated and philosophical. He is capable of drawing allegorical parallels between the lives of animals in zoo cages and human beings. The elevated level of his intellectual status is highlighted by his awareness that the cage of humans begins not just literal but metaphorical. Even more so, he is attuned to the reality that many people are not able to recognize the state of their imprisonment.
The poem comes to its conclusion, not with an affirmation, but with a rhetorical question. This choice strongly suggests the speaker has received a formal education within an institute of higher learning demanding critical thought. After conveying his thoughts on the relationship between enslaved animals and imprisoned humanity, he chooses not to explicitly deliver a conclusion but to turn the matter over to readers. By leaving unanswered the query of whether animals or humans face the more wretched condition, he is subtly moving the subject of the debate. The implication is that he has definitively quashed any debate over whether mankind is as caged as a zoo animal or not.
The Lion
Of the animals actually, on display in the zoo, only a lion is singled out as an inhabitant. The king of the beasts is described majestically and admiringly as possessing a character still untamed despite his imprisonment. Man is compared to the lion in the abstract to his individual detriment; all lions are implicated as kingly beasts while within mankind there is a widespread ability to be tamed.
The wording of the language used in the poem relative to the lion carries an implicit assertion. The world of the lion is a place where the natural order of things is at its simplest. The physically strongest dominate over those that are weaker. Survival is based upon the expectation of roles being fulfilled according to the accident of birth. The lion’s untamed heart and lordly demeanor are, in other words, the result of being the biggest and strongest, and most fearsome beast.
This simplistic order within the natural world is juxtaposed against mankind to the benefit of the lion. The lion can remain untamed as a species even if a few individual members have been captured and caged in a zoo. Allegorically speaking, as a species the lion remains superior to human beings who exist within a more complicated social order in which being wild and free is very much the exception and being tamed and imprisoned is the norm.
Mankind
Humanity is, however, also made a character in the abstract. The speaker compares the cages inside the zoo to human existence in a way that differs mainly by the dimension of imprisonment. Ultimately, humanity is a collective entity divided into three specific types.
There are those members of the population with characteristics similar to an eagle who react to enslavement and bondage by doing what it takes to clear a pathway facilitating the opportunity to fly freely. These individuals are contrasted with members of humanity who are more like a mole. The moles of humanity look downward instead of upward as the means to deal with being caged. To escape the torture of their imprisonment, they dig deeper but not to escape their prison, Instead, their strategy is either to distract themselves from it or to refashion it so it seems to be a cage of their own making. And finally, the third group of humanity accepts their imprisonment within a cage without effort to escape or adapt, choosing instead to sit still like a snake suppressed and oppressed into permanent incapacity.
By the end, the speaker posits his rhetorical question which asks whether the animals in the zoo or humans are more wretched. By refusing to answer his own question, the poet is making a statement about the wretchedness of humanity. There is little question that some readers will answer that the animals have it worse while others will declare humans to be in the more wretched situation. It is that third group that is most harshly implicated, however, as the speaker knows full well that a sizable portion of humanity that reads the poem will dismiss the comparison altogether in their insistence that humanity, elevated by the word of God, cannot be compared to beasts. And, of course, this very reaction indicates the circumstances of the metaphorical cage in which they are imprisoned without even realizing it.
