The poetic duality of Claude McKay: Where militant rhetoric meets sacred silence

“ It is the peculiarity of his experience, rather than of his nature, that makes this poet’s race a fact to be remembered in the enjoyment of his songs. The subject of all poetry is the experience of the poet, and no man of any other race in the world can touch or imagine the experience of the children of African slaves in America.
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. He was born to the genial, warm, patient, neighborly farmer’s life of that island. ”

“ But in so far as the problem arises between a dominant and a subjected race, it is impossible for science to say anything even as to averages. For a fair general test is impossible. The children of the subjected race never have a chance. To be deprived at the very dawn of selfhood of a sense of possible superiority, is to be undernourished at the point of chief educative importance. And to be assailed in early childhood with a pervading intimation of inferiority is poison in the very centers of growth. ”

“ 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. A wider experience and a man’s comprehension of the science of history has only strengthened his voice and his resolution. ”

“ He knew that his voice belonged not only to his own moods and the general experience of humanity, but to the hopes and sorrows of his race.
A great many foolish things are said even by wise people upon the subject of racial inferiority. They seem to think that if science could establish a certain difference of average ability as between the whites and blacks, that would justify them in placing the whole of one of these rces in a position of inferior esteem. The same fallacy is committed in the discussions of sex-inferiority, and it is worth while to make clear the perfect folly of it. ”

“ Like men we'll face the murderous cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
First published in Max Eastman's magazine The Liberator, the poem was reprinted in every Negro publication of any consequence. It forced its way into the Negro pulpit (a most interesting phenomenon for this black heretic) . Ministers ended their sermons with it, and the congregations responded, Amen. It was repeated in Negro clubs and Negro schools and at Negro mass meetings. To thousands of Negroes who are not trained to appreciate poetry, "If We Must Die" makes me a poet. ”

“ The grief that rends one heart like an earthquake, sinks with dead, silent weight into another, uttering no sound, giving no outward sign, and yet is powerful, perhaps, as that which exhausts itself in tumult. Some flee from grief, half defying, half evading it, pausing, breathless, in the race, now and then, to find the arrow still buried in the side, rankling deeper and deeper with each fierce effort to cast it out.
Thus it was with the woman to whom our story tends—Ada, the insulted and suffering widow of Leicester. ”

“ We can only distantly imagine how the happy tropic life of play and affection, became shadowed and somber for this sensitive boy as he grew, by a sense of the subjection of his people, and the memory of their bondage to an alien race. 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. ”

“ Like a blue-bird’s note in a March wind, those sudden clear thoughts of the warm South ring out in the midst of his northern songs. 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. ”

“ O word I love to sing! thou art too tender
⁠For all the passions agitating me;
For all my bitterness thou art too tender,
⁠I cannot pour my red soul into thee.
O haunting melody! thou art too slender,
⁠Too fragile like a globe of crystal glass ”

“ Many are silent under mutilation, and endure scourging or torture at the hand of despots or tyrants without uttering a word, whenever their soul, abating the pain by reason, forcibly as it were checks and represses them: but you can never quiet anger or smother grief, or persuade a timid person not to run away, or one suffering from remorse not to cry out, nor tear his hair, nor smite his thigh. Thus vice is stronger than fire and sword. ”

“ There is silent and long-suffering sorrow to be met with among the peasantry. It withdraws into itself and is still. But there is a grief that breaks out, and from that minute it bursts into tears and finds vent in wailing. This is particularly common with women. But it is no lighter a grief than the silent. Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to reopen the wound. ”

“ Except for people of the highest force of character, therefore, to be born into a subjected race is to grow up inferior, not only to the other race, but to one’s own potential self. We see an example of this kind of growth in the bombastic locutions of the traditional “darkie” who has acquired a little culture. Those great big words and long sentences are the result of a feeling of inferiority. They are a pathetic over-correction of the very quality of simple-heartedness which is carried so high in these poems of Claude McKay. ”

“ A West Indian charlatan came to this country, full of antiquated social ideas; yet within a decade he aroused the social consciousness of the Negro masses more than any leader ever did. When Negroes really desire a new group orientation they will create it.
Such is my opinion for all that it may be worth. I suppose I have a poet's right to imagine a great modern Negro leader. At least I would like to celebrate him in a monument of verse. For I have nothing to give but my singing. All my life I have been a troubadour wanderer, nourishing myself mainly on the poetry of existence. ”

“ In the East the clouds glow crimson with the new dawn that is breaking,
And its golden glory fills the western skies.
O my brothers and my sisters, wake! arise!
For the new birth rends the old earth and the very dead are waking,
Ghosts are turned flesh, throwing off the grave’s disguise,
And the foolish, even children, are made wise;
For the big earth groans in travail for the strong, new world in making{50}—
O my brothers, dreaming for dim centuries,
Wake from sleeping; to the East turn, turn your eyes!
Oh the night is sweet for sleeping, but the shining day’s for working ”

“ The cage was gently and tenderly silent; and grief and tears, and far-away dead laughter were felt in that silence. The silence of his wife, softened by the intervening walls, was obstinate, heavy as lead; and terrible, so terrible that Father Ignaty turned cold on the hottest day. Endless, cold as the grave, mysterious as death, was the silence of his daughter. It was as though the silence were a torture to itself, and as though it longed passionately to pass into speech, but that something strong and dull as a machine, held it motionless, and stretched it like a wire. ”

“ But only chokin’ sobs he heard,
My mout’ could never speak a word.
An’ so for long days all was grief,
An’ never could I get relief;
My heart be’n full of emptiness,
With naught to love an’ naught to bless. ”

“ Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome Has many sonnets: so here now shall be One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me To her whose heart is my heart's quiet home, To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome; Whose service is my special dignity, And she my loadstar while I go and come. And so because you love me, and because I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath Of rhymes wherewith to crown your honored name: In you not fourscore years can dim the flame Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws Of time and change and mortal life and death. ”

“ To ask nothing, to give everything, to purchase momentary rapture with the grief of years, to toil without reward, to love and be forgotten, to yield flesh and heart for the nurture of the seeds of life in others, to create for them the unparticipated victory—that was the destiny of motherhood, a thing not less sacred than the love that once endured the Cross for man. ”

“ It behoves us in these days to mourn our dead in secret. Personal sorrows no longer count; and we must learn how to suppress them in the presence of that greater sorrow which extends over all the world, the particular sorrow of the mothers who are setting us an example of the most heroic silence that human suffering has been taught to observe since suffering first visited womankind. ”

“ We talked, Maud and I, for the first time, I think, without reserve, without bitterness, almost without grief, of Alec. What sustains her is the certainty that he is as he was, somewhere, far off, as brave and loving as ever, waiting for us, but waiting with a perfect understanding and knowledge of why we are separated. She dreams of him thus, looking down upon her, and seeming, in her dream, to wonder what there can be to grieve about. I suppose that a mother has a sense of oneness with a child that a father cannot have. ”

“ Receive my offering, yielding unto me.
Oh, with our love the night is warm and deep!
The air is sweet, my flower, and sweet the flute
Whose music lulls our burning brain to sleep,
While we lie loving, passionate and mute. ”

“ Where in the starlit stillness we lay mute,
⁠And heard the whispering showers all night long,
And your brown burning body was a lute
⁠Whereon my passion played his fevered song.
When June comes dancing o'er the death of May,
⁠With scarlet roses staining her fair feet,
My soul takes leave of me to sing all day
⁠A love so fugitive and so complete. ”

“ When the lute is broken, Sweet tones are remembered not; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon forgot. As music and splendor Survive not the lamp and the lute, The heart's echoes render No song when the spirit is mute— No song but sad dirges, Like the wind through a ruined cell, Or the mournful surges That ring the dead seaman's knell. ”

“ But thou, to whom I turn with reverent eyes— O stately Father, whose majestic face Shines far above the zone of wind and cloud, Where high dominion of the morning is— Thou hast the Song complete of which my songs Are pallid adumbrations! Certain sounds Of strong authentic sorrow in this book May have the sob of upland torrents—these, And only these, may touch the great World's heart; For, lo! they are the issues of that grief Which makes a man more human, and his life More like that frank, exalted life of thine. ”

“ A sufferer with a touching face By love and grief made beautiful; Whose rapt religion lights the place Where death holds awful rule. The fair, tired soul whose twofold grief For child and father lends a tone Of pathos to the pallid leaf That sighs above the stone. The large beloved heart whereon She used to lean, lies still and cold, Where, like a seraph, shines the sun On flowerful green and gold. ”

“ Dat would fingle up me jaw
When de fever burned so deep,
An’ A couldn’ get no sleep?
Where’s de voice me love’ to hear
Whisp’rin’ sweetest words o’ cheer?—
Voice dat taught me A B C
As me leaned ’pon mumma’s knee. ”

“ We have excessively welcomed other black poets of minor talent, seeking in their music some distinctive quality other than the fact that they wrote it. But here for the first time we find our literature vividly enriched by a voice from this most alien race among us. And it should be illuminating to observe that while these poems are characteristic of that race as we most admire it—they are gentle-simple, candid, brave and friendly, quick of laughter and of tears—yet they are still more characteristic of what is deep and universal in mankind. ”

“ Death and the mysteries of life, the pain and the grief that flesh and soul are heirs to, the eternal problems that address themselves to all generations and races, produce in the soul of the Negro the same reactions as of old they produced in the soul of David or of Homer, or as, in our own day, in the soul of a Wordsworth or a Shelley. ”

“ Moreover, her discretion enabled her to perceive that this was not the time [153] for explanation, for the hours of grief are sacred, and the heart must be left to do its work by opening the issues of Nature’s assuagement, or ceasing to beat. So the night passed, without question or answer; and the following day, that of the marriage, was one of silence, even as if death had touched the tongue that used to be the medium of cheerful words and tender sympathies—a strange contrast to the joy, if not revelry, in Advocate’s Close. ”