Complete Poems

Claude McKay, William J. Maxwell, William Maxwell

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780252094972
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía

Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred previously unpublished works, this unique collection showcases the intellectual range of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose life and work were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest. McKay's first poems were composed in rural Jamaican creole and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the bottom up. Migrating to New York, he reinvigorated the English sonnet and helped spark the Harlem Renaissance with poems such as "If We Must Die." After coming under scrutiny for his communism, he traveled throughout Europe and North Africa for twelve years and returned to Harlem in 1934, having denounced Stalin's Soviet Union. By then, McKay's pristine "violent sonnets" were giving way to confessional lyrics informed by his newfound Catholicism.

McKay's verse eludes easy definition, yet this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William J. Maxwell, acquaints readers with the full transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.

NOTES TO THE POEMS

Jamaican Periodical Poetry, 1911–12

My notes dealing with Jamaican dialect are greatly indebted to F. G. Cassidy and R. B. Le Page’s Dictionary of Jamaican English.

“Agnes o’ de Village Lane”: Published in the Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica), 7 Oct. 1911, 6. According to Winston James, this poem commemorates McKay’s childhood love, Agnes, who died while working in a Kingston brothel. Several other sympathetic poems about prostitutes would follow, and Agnes in particular may be enshrined in “Commemoration” and “Memorial” from the collection Harlem Shadows.

“Sweet Times”: Published in the Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica), 21 Oct. 1911, 17. Line 2, “jackna-bush”: the Eupatorium odoratum, a large white “tea bush” with medicinal uses. Line 14, “Favour”: to seem or appear.

“De Hailstorm”: Published in the Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica), 11 Nov. 1911, 18. Line 7, “patt’rin’”: pattering. Line 28, “hope fe meet”: hope to meet.

“The Daily Gleaner”: Published on the cover of the Christmas insert to the Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica), 16 Dec. 1911. A note in the original explains that the poem was written at the Gleaner’s request to celebrate “the growth of the [newspaper] since 1834, when it was first established.” Despite the paper’s connections to the island plantocracy, McKay manages to link the Gleaner’s birth to the emancipation of Jamaican slaves. In August 1833, slavery was legally abolished throughout the British Empire, with the provisions of freedom taking hold one year later. Line 18, “Tell”: until.

“The Christmas Tree”: Published in the Christmas insert to the Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica), 16 Dec. 1911, 11. Line 6, “red god-rose”: a type of West Indian mistletoe. Line 13, “fee-fees”: toy whistles.

“Christmas in de Air”: Published in the Jamaica Times, 16 Dec. 1911, 27. Though the poem was specially commissioned by the Times, its focus on government inaction in the face of want and despair is extraordinary and should be compared with the very different holiday scene of “The Christmas Tree.” Line 13, “mancha leaf”: banana leaf, from a nickname for the Martinique banana. Line 42, “Hard Times”: a reference to the Charles Dickens industrial protest novel, published in 1854 and denounced by Thomas Macaulay for its “sullen socialism.” The atmosphere of Dickens’s Christmas Carol (1843) also informs the poem. Line 46, “poppy show”: a puffed-up display, concealing inadequacy.

“Peasants’ Ways o’ Thinkin’”: Published in the Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica), 27 Jan. 1912, 18. Line 5, “wan’ fe try”: should try. Line 7, “caan’”: can’t. Line 13, “buccra”: the white man. Line 14, “duty”: a regressive tax then imposed by Jamaican law on imported foods. Line 15, “fe we”: for us. Line 18, “osnabu’g”: rough, thick cloth, once used in the work clothes of slaves. Line 19, “gill”: money. Line 44, “t’atch”: thatch. Line 53, “lee”: little. Line 56, “fuppence”: five pence. Line 60, “Syrian”: the emigrants from Lebanon, Damascus, and Bethlehem who began arriving in Jamaica in the 1890s and who established themselves as peddlers. Lines 81–82, “Colon,” Panama, and “Limon,” Costa Rica: common destinations of Jamaican economic migrants in the early twentieth century. Line 93, “John-t’-whits”: black-whiskered vireos; “mammee tree”: the West Indian tree Mammea americana. Line 103, “ru’nate”: ruined. Line 117, “mancha-root”: banana tree.

“Passive Resistance”: Published in the Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica), 6 Apr. 1912, page number unknown. The text and citation are taken from Wayne F. Cooper’s generally reliable selection of McKay’s poems and prose, The Passion of Claude McKay. My own examination of the Gleaner’s run from 1911 through 1912 did not uncover any printings of the poem, though Max Eastman’s introduction to Harlem Shadows and Winston James’s Fierce Hatred of Injustice concur on McKay’s authorship. The poem voices the position of those citizens of Kingston, dubbed “passive resisters” in advance of the U.S. civil rights movement, who fought the imposition of higher tramway fees in 1912 through a campaign to inconvenience conductors with requests for change and transfer vouchers. McKay’s speaker recommends keeping active, rioting resisters “in check,” but the martial rhetoric of “If We Must Die” (1919) is already in rehearsal. Line 15, “aye”: ever.

“My Eucharis”: Published in the Jamaica Times, 20 Apr. 1912, 1. Line 2, “my Eucharis”: neither a beloved woman nor an allusion to Holy Communion, but a bulbous flower. Line 13, “twinin’ wis”: a twining tree wand, especially that of a willow.

“George William Gordon to the Oppressed Natives”: Published in T.P.’s Weekly (London), Apr. 1912, page unknown. Republished in the Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica), 3 May 1912, 13; and as “Gordon to the Oppressed Natives” in the Jamaica Times, 4 May 1912, 20, with “Wilberforce” for “Wil’erforce” in line 9; “and” for “an’” in line 10; “Tyranny” for “tyranny” in line 11; “freedmen” for “freed men” in line 19; and “thy kind;” for “my kind!” in line 23. McKay here ventriloquizes the Jamaican national hero George William Gordon (circa 1820–65). Born the son of a Scottish plantation owner and an Afro-Jamaican slave mother, Gordon became a powerful landowner and a prominent member of the “free coloureds” who helped to spark nineteenth-century Jamaican nationalism. Despite his wealth, Gordon was the leading voice of the poor in the Jamaican House of Assembly and was publicly hanged for his possible role in the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865, in which impoverished blacks burned the Morant Bay courthouse after being denied an audience with the governor. Winston James quotes McKay’s prideful memory that the poem “created as much of a stir as ‘If We Must Die’ created in the United States” (89). Lines 9–10, “Wil’erforce”; “Sharpe an’ Buxton”: William Wilberforce and Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton were leading English parliamentary abolitionists of the early nineteenth century; Samuel “Daddy” Sharpe, another national hero of Jamaica, was a Baptist deacon, slave leader, and martyr who organized the Christmas rebellion of slaves in the western parishes in 1831–32. Line 13, “Clarkson’s”: Thomas Clarkson was a leading antislavery organizer in England and Scotland and the author of the Cambridge University prize essay “Is It Right to Make Men Slaves against Their Will?” (1785).

“Snared!”: Published in the Jamaica Times, 27 July 1912, 1. Line 1, “Johnnie”: the black-whiskered vireo, sometimes called the John-to-whit or John-chewit in Jamaica in honor of its song. Line 4, “Butty’s”: the name Butty is perhaps a version of Buta, derived from the Ko word for man, mbuta, and used in Jamaica’s St. Thomas Parish to refer to an adult. Line 6, “mammee tree”: see the note to line 93 of “Peasants’ Ways o’ Thinkin’.” Line 10, “Jew water”: dew, from the more common juu or ju-ju water.

“Clarendon Hills, Farewell!”: Published in the Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica), 5 Aug. 1912, 3. Line 2, “aye”: ever.

“To a Friend”: Published in the Jamaica Times, 17 Aug. 1912, 1. Note to the original: “These lines were written on the eve of the author’s departure to America to take a course of Agricultural training.” Line 5, “ere”: before.

Songs of Jamaica (1912)

McKay’s Songs of Jamaica was published by Aston W. Gardner of Kingston in 1912. McKay dedicated the book to the island’s governor, a fellow Fabian socialist and a friend of his mentor Walter Jekyll:

TO HIS EXCELLENCY

SIR SYDNEY OLIVIER, K.C.M.G.,

GOVERNOR OF JAMAICA,

WHO

BY HIS SYMPATHY WITH THE BLACK RACE HAS WON

THE LOVE AND ADMIRATION OF ALL JAMAICANS,

THIS VOLUME IS

BY PERMISSION

RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED.

Jekyll’s technical preface to McKay’s poems in the “Jamaican tongue,” imagined as an elegantly feminine and romantic “negro variant” of the English language, reads as follows:

What Italian is to Latin, that in regard to English is the negro variant thereof. It shortens, softens, rejects the harder sounds alike of consonants and vowels; I might almost say, refines. In its soft tones we have an expression of the languorous sweetness of the South: it is a feminine version of masculine English; preeminently a language of love, as all will feel who, setting prejudice aside, will allow the charmingly naïve love-songs of this volume to make their due impression upon them. But this can only happen when the verses are read aloud, and those unacquainted with the Jamaican tongue may therefore welcome a few hints as to pronunciation.

As a broad general direction, let it be observed that the vowels have rather the continental than the English sounds, while in the matter of the consonants the variation from English is of the nature of a pretty lisp.

The exact values of the vowels cannot, of course, be described, but they approximate on the whole more to those of Italy and France than to those of England. One sound, that of aw, is entirely rejected, and ah is substituted for it. Thus bawl, law, call, daughter, etc., become bahl, lah, cahl, dahter, etc.

In the word whe’, which sometimes means where and sometimes which, the e has the same sound as in the word met. Deh is similarly pronounced, and the e is quite a short one, the h being added merely to distinguish deh from de (the). This short e often takes the place of the close English a, as in tek (take), mek (make).

My is almost invariably pronounced with a short y, and, to remind the reader of this, it is constantly spelt me. Fe—generally meaning to, but sometimes for—matches this short my exactly. In caan’ (can’t) the a is doubled in order to ensure the pronunciation cahn.

It is difficult to convey the exact value of do’n (down), groun’ (ground). There is a faint trace of ng at the end of these words, and they rhyme to tongue pronounced very shortly and with a dumber vowel sound.

Vowels are sometimes changed out of mere caprice, as it seems. Thus we have ef for if, trimble for tremble, anedder for anudder (another), stimulent for stimulant, a—pronounced short—for I, sperit for spirit.

In ya, originally meaning d’you hear—but now thrown in just to fill up, like the don’t you know of certain talkers—the a is a short ah.

We come now to the consonants. Bearing in mind what was said above of the pretty lisp, let the d so often—generally, we may say—substituted for th, be of the very softest, as it were a th turning towards d, or to put it in another way, a lazily pronounced th. The negro has no difficulty whatever in pronouncing it clearly: it is merely that he does not, as a rule, take the trouble to do so. In these poems the, they, there, with, etc., are not always written de, dey, dere, wid, etc.; and the reader is at liberty to turn any soft th into d, and any d into soft th. And here let me remark, in passing, that in one breath the black man will pronounce a word in his own way, and in the next will articulate it as purely as the most refined Englishman. Where the substitution of d makes the word unrecognisable, as in moder (mother), oders (others), the spelling mudder, udders is resorted to; and for fear of confusion with well-known words, though, those are always written thus, although generally pronounced, dough, dose.

As d supplants the soft th, so does a simple t supplant the hard one; as in ting, not’ing (or nuttin’,—for the g in words of two or more syllables is very commonly left out), t’ink, t’ick, t’rough, met’od, wutless (worthless).

V tends to pass into b, as in lub (love), hab, lib, ebery, neber, cultibation. Vex, though so written for the most part, is pronounced either with a decided b or with some compromise between that and v.

Of elisions, the commonest is that of the initial s when followed by another consonant. Thus start, spread, stop, scrape, spoil, sting, skin, etc., become ’tart, ’pread, ’top, ’crape, ’poil, ’ting, ’kin, etc.

Final d’s are often dropped, as in lan’, t’ousan’, please’ (pleased) and other past participles, min’, chil’—in these let care be taken to keep the long sound of the i—wul’ (world), wud (word), en’.

Final t’s also; as in breas’, cas’, ’gains’ (against), i’ (it), las’, wha’, wus’ (worst), tas’e (taste).

Present participles, passin’, brukin’ (breaking), outpourin’, etc., lose their g’s; and final k’s sometimes disappear, as in tas’. R’s, too, as in you’ for your, mo’ for more, befo’ or simply ’fo’ for before: and they are even thrown out from the middle of words, as in wuk (work), tu’n (turn), wud (word). Will occasionally loses its l’s and becomes wi’.

Initial vowels have also a habit of vanishing: as in ’bout (about), ’long (along), ’way (away), nuff (enough), ’pon (upon); but the elision of these and of longer first syllables is sometimes made up by tacking something to the end, and for about, without, because we get ’bouten, ’douten, ’causen.

On the construction of the language it is unnecessary t...