This is the song version published in 1922 of a work Ives wrote in 1906. It is perhaps better known as a piece for small orchestra, "In The Cage," released by Ives in 1932 as the first movement of the Set for Theatre Orchestra, S. 20.

This work belongs to a category of short Ives pieces that the composer called "take-offs." As early as his college days at Yale Ives entertained friends, roommates, and fraternity brothers with piano improvisations that depicted events of the day (things like a football game, a lecture, or the traditional fraternity pledge night festivities). His friends were amused by their sound effects and didn't really stop to worry about whether what they were listening to was actual music or just Charlie playing around at the piano, but Ives jotted down the most successful ideas to emerge from these take-offs. Ives kept up this habit when he was an aspiring young businessman in Manhattan in the decade after his graduation from Yale in 1908. He and a few other young men lived in a succession of apartments they called "Poverty Flats" but which were in reality pretty comfortable lodgings.

One of his roommates was David Twichell, son of New Haven, Connecticut's most prominent clergyman. Through Rev. Twichell, a young exile from China, Bart Yung, came to live there. (Yung's father was a revolutionary who had been compelled to flee China.) One day Ives, Yung, and another roommate, George Lewis, visited Central Park Zoo, where the saw a leopard pacing restlessly back and forth in its cage. Bart joked, "Is life anything like that?" Ives transformed the quip into a short poem that first depicts the leopard, then transforms Yung into "a boy who had been there three hours." The song is essentially an epigram in music, built on radical new chords piled up in the interval of the fourth rather than the conventional thirds. Also remarkable is the repeated introduction to the piano part, a succession of chords of durations lasting (in terms of sixteenth notes) the sequence of 8-6-4-3-2-1. This shortening of the length of each chord has an uncanny claustrophobic effect. "The Cage" is one of Ives' most effective ultra-short pieces.

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