Today’s Poem: The Tropics in New York

Claude McKay’s distant presences

Charles Plumier (1646-1704), Fève de cacao (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Tropics in New York

by Claude McKay

Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root,
Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,
And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,
Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,

Set in the window, bringing memories
Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills,
And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies
In benediction over nun-like hills.

My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;
A wave of longing through my body swept,
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.

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Readers here will recall Steven Knepper’s discussion of “The Pool,” by H.D., which appeared as Today’s Poem back in May. The Bruce C. Gottwald, Jr. ’81 Chair for Academic Excellence at the Virginia Military Institute, author of studies of William Desmond and Byung-Chul Han, and editor of the freshly launched poetry journal New Verse Review, Knepper returns with an introduction to the Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay (1890–1948), whose birthday is this week, September 15th. Today’s Poem is taken from McKay’s early and influential book, Harlem Shadows (1922).

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Steven Knepper writes:

Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows, published by Harcourt, Brace in 1922, is a crucial early work of the Harlem Renaissance. It is also a collection of subtly innovative formalist poetry that, alongside collections such as Robert Frost’s North of Boston and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s A Few Figs From Thistles, confounds the still widespread conflation of modernism and free verse. Some poems in Harlem Shadows contrast McKay’s boyhood in bucolic rural Jamaica with New York City, where he experienced both the vitality and “vigor” of the big city but also homesickness and racism. (On McKay’s ambivalence toward New York, see his classic sonnet “America.”) This juxtaposition of countryside and city evokes the long pastoral tradition in poetry, made new by McKay via the particulars of his time, place, circumstance, and experience.

“The Tropics in New York” is perhaps the best of these poems of juxtaposition. The speaker, walking down the street, has an encounter (presumably unexpected) with sumptuous tropic fruits “set in the window” of a shop. The first stanza’s cataloged fruit evokes powerful memories. McKay’s mangoes act in a similar way to Proust’s madeleine, summoning up temps perdu. The second quatrain presents remembered landscapes — “dewy dawns,” “mystical blue skies,” “nun-like hills.” These memories suggest beauty, peace, and blessing, all in contrast with the New York City volatility and, often, hostility we see throughout Harlem Shadows. The speaker is ultimately overwhelmed. He turns away from the window and weeps. Several of McKay’s best-known poems are Shakespearean sonnets, and the three cross-rhymed quatrains “The Tropics in New York” are of course just one closing couplet shy of a sonnet. Perhaps we could even see the poem as cut short as the homesick speaker turns away.

Claude McKay (Wikimedia Commons)

What makes the poem most poignant to me are the people—the family, friends, and neighbors — who are not explicitly present in the fruit-inspired reverie but are implied by the “parish fairs” and “the old, familiar ways.” Another poem in Harlem Shadows, “Home Thoughts,” acts as a companion to “Tropics in New York.” “Home Thoughts” features mangoes, bananas, and beautiful landscapes, but it also names childhood friends. In “Tropics in New York,” by contrast, the people of the speaker’s childhood are palpable presences — or perhaps, more accurately, sorely missed absences — far away in distance and time, that he seemingly cannot bring himself to name as he stands on the sidewalk.

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