“And ten thousand birds, they cannot be caged.”
The quote, “And ten thousand birds, they cannot be caged,” is from Alex McElroy’s “A Man and A Man”. It is towards the end of the two men’s conversation about the sad man’s wife. It was the celebrity’s metaphor to explain how she is a woman who won’t settle down, who won’t give up her freedom, who is bound to leave him. This image relates to that metaphor in two ways. The first being the obvious illustration for the cage metaphor. Second, the image representing the woman or “ten thousand birds,” breaking free. Someone could say, well you don’t know that birds were in there. Well Mr./Mrs. Smarty-pants, you can assume there were birds because it’s a bird cage, and one that wouldn’t fit ten thousand birds. I feel the reason the author used ten thousand is because that’s about the size you would see when they are the huge clouds off the side of the roads. The big clouds of birds that move as one. Ten thousand is also a good number to illustrate a size that cannot be contained by normal means. Also this image shows the birds already gone. As for the juxtaposition of the text and image, I would say that they are related as a sentence and illustration of the same idea/metaphor.
Works Cited
Berti, Fabio. “Broken Bird Cage, the Concept of Escape.” 123RF, 2020,
http://www.123rf.com/photo_11087446_broken-bird-cage-the-concept-of-escape.html.
