I’ve been looking for a particular poem for a while now. When someone used the hashtag #SherlockPoems in a Twitter conversation I posted my inquiry. The poem I remember – but can’t find – is about a market stall heaped with glowing and colorful tropical fruits. It was used in a GSE exam paper sometime in the 1970’s.
I didn’t get the poem I was looking for but a Twitter friend sent a link to Claude McKay’s wonderful poem about homesickness, exile, things left behind, and longing: “The Tropics of New York”.
The only other poem of McKay’s I knew was his much anthologized sonnet of defiance “If We Must Die”.
There’s a story that Churchill quoted that poem in his wartime speeches. It certainly captures the spirit of defiance against all odds and it sounds like the kind of thing he would say. But – there is no evidence that Churchill used the poem so that’s a myth.
He may have known of it however. In 1919 McKay left the U.S. for London, where he worked for Sylvia Pankhurst’s radical newspaper The Worker’s Dreadnought. Churchill was an avid reader and was known to read widely across the political spectrum.
McKay had written the “If we Must Die” in reaction to the deadly racist attacks on African Americans in 1919 while he was working as a dining-car waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad.
It was first published that year in the July issue of The Liberator, a left-wing magazine edited in New York by Max Eastman and later by McKay. The poem made him famous.
In his introduction to McKay’s first American poetry collection Harlem Shadows (1922), Eastman writes of McKay’s early life and tells a remarkable family story:
Claude McKay was born in 1890 in a little thatched house of two rooms in a beautiful valley of the hilly middle-country of Jamaica. … his poems are forever homeward yearning—in the midst of their present passion and strong will into the future ….They carry a thrill into the depth of our hearts. Perhaps in some sense they are thoughts of a mother. At least it seems inevitable that we should find among them those two sacred sonnets of a child’s bereavement. It seems inevitable that a wonderful poet should have had a wise and beautiful mother.
Indeed the memory of Claude McKay’s family goes back on his mother’s side beyond the days of bondage, to a time in Madagascar when they were still free, and by the grace of God still “savage.” He learned in early childhood the story of their violent abduction, and how they were freighted over the seas in ships, and sold at public auction in Jamaica. He learned another story, too, which must have kindled a fire that slept in his blood—a story of the rebellion of the members of his own family at the auction-block. A death-strike, we should call it now—for they agreed that if they were divided and sold away into different parts of the country they would all kill themselves. And this fact solemnly announced in the market by the oldest white-haired Negro among them, had such an effect upon prospective buyers that it was impossible to sell them as individuals, and so they were all taken away together to those hills at Clarendon which their descendants still cultivate. With the blood of these rebels in his veins, and their memory to stir it, we cannot wonder that Claude McKay’s earliest boyish songs in the Jamaica dialect were full of heresy and the militant love of freedom, and that his first poem of political significance should have been a rally-call to the street-car men on strike in Kingston. He found himself by an instinctive gravitation singing in the forefront of the battle for human liberty.
In America McKay attended school at the Tuskeegee Institute and then agricultural college in Kansas with the intention of returning to Jamaica. He left college in 1914 a poet and politically committed “a vagabond with a purpose”.
I came to complete my education. But after a few years of study at the Kansas State College I was gripped by the lust to wander and wonder. The spirit of the vagabond, the demon of some poets, had got hold of me. I quit college.I had no desire to return home. A Long Way From Home
“Tropics in New York” tells of looking in a shop window and being overcome with emotion at things that bring back the past. For McKay that meant his home in Jamaica and also perhaps the language and life he had left behind. His early poems were written in Jamaican dialect and he had a gift for writing in the natural speech of his people. He also had an extraordinary gift and affinity with the forms and language of the traditional poetic canon.
“I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.”
And I was reminded of another poem of tearing nostalgia that ends in tears – “Piano” by D.H.Lawrence where the sound of a woman’s singing transports him back to a childhood scene and to his mother. “I weep like a child for the past.”
The poem is a Freudian’s delight but at least there are no leaping loins.
McKay (1889-1948) was a great admirer of Lawrence (1885-1930) and of course they were contemporaries.
In his autobiography, he wrote:
D.H.Lawrence was the modern writer I preferred above any….
In D.H.Lawrence I found confusion—all of the ferment and torment and turmoil, the hesitation and hate and alarm, the sexual inquietude and the incertitude of this age, and the psychic and romantic groping for a way out.
Some of my friends thought I showed a preference for D.H.Lawrence because he was something of a social rebel. But it was impossible for me seriously to think ofLawrence as a social thinker, after having studied the social thinking of creative writers like Ruskin, William Morris,Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw, and other social propagandists. In fact, Lawrence’s attitude toward his subject matter, his half-suppressed puritanism, often repelled me. What I loved was the Laurentian language, which to me is the ripest and most voluptuous expression of English since Shakespeare. A Long Way From Home (1937)
McKay felt a psychic kinship with Lawrence that was based on their parallel lives of restless travel, struggle for identity and alienation from a hostile society. When Lawrence died in 1930 McKay wrote,” … it was very sad to hear of D.H.Lawrence’s death. Although I never met him, it was like losing a close friend.”
Beyond bursting into tears and writing about it the two writers had something else in common: The Cambridge literary critic and scholar I.A. Richards. But I’m saving that for another post.
Photo by Arturo Rivera on Unsplash
Though this is probably not the poem you were looking for, your search into “a market stall heaped with glowing and colorful tropical fruits” reminded me of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” poem. And thank you for the introduction to Claude McKay.
It isn’t. But thank you for leading me to go and read it again.
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries;—
All ripe together
I don’t think he wrote any war-themed poems. I’m working my way through “Harlem Shadows” and his pre-occupations are elsewhere. Love, nature, loss, memory, alienation, racism, race relations, politics.
The main character in his novel “Home to Harlem” is Jake who walked out on the war and the army in France.
When McKay was working on the Pennsylvania Railroad he was once picked up in a police sweep as a potential draft dodger or vagrant. He was on an overnight rest in Pittsburgh and left his papers behind when he went out for the night. He got through the night by remembering poetry: “Three of us, two colored, one white, were put into a cell which was actually a water closet with an old-fashioned fetid hole.It was stinking, suffocating. I tried to overcome the stench by breathing through my mind all the fragrant verse I could find in the range of my memory.”
See – you never know when a few memorized poems will come in handy. But no “war” poems so far.
Brilliant. Do you know, please, if McKay wrote any war-themed poems during the First World War?