10 of the Best Claude McKay Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The poet and novelist Claude McKay (1889-1948) is widely seen as the progenitor of the literary movement that would become known as the Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, along with Langston Hughes, McKay is perhaps the poet who did more than any other to raise the profile of this group of African American writers, artists, and musicians working in New York in the 1920s.

Unlike earlier poems written by and about black Americans, and reflecting their plight, McKay’s work does not seek to rouse sympathy among white readers or to gloss over the harsh reality of life for many black Americans living in the United States. But unlike many other Harlem Renaissance poets, such as Hughes, Claude McKay often prefers to work in established forms, such as the sonnet.

What are McKay’s greatest poems? Below, we select and introduce ten of his best, and best-known, compositions.

1. ‘Harlem Shadows’.

Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way
Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace,
Has pushed the timid little feet of clay,
The sacred brown feet of my fallen race!
Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet
In Harlem wandering from street to street.

The title poem in McKay’s breakthrough collection of 1922, ‘Harlem Shadows’ was written in 1918 and is one of his first attempts to write about the people of Harlem. Immediately, we see McKay refusing to shy away from the darker aspects of the neighbourhood.

The ‘shapes of girls’ leaving these shadows at night are the young women soliciting for custom from men: prostitutes with ‘timid little feet’, driven by hunger and poverty to sell their bodies for a little money.

2. ‘To the White Fiends’.

Be not deceived, for every deed you do
I could match – out-match: am I not Afric’s son,
Black of that black land where black deeds are done?

Here we find McKay using his favourite verse form: the sonnet. This 1919 poem shows how staunch and strong-willed was McKay’s opposition to the racism and discrimination he and other black Americans faced from their white neighbours.

What’s especially striking here is the way he uses the white man’s lazy stereotypes about black Americans and turns them on his accuser: if they think he is a ‘fiend’, he can out-fiend them, if he chooses.

But as the sonnet develops, McKay turns away from this argument, stating instead that God made him to be a light in the darkness, rather than one who adds to it.

3. ‘Enslaved’.

Oh when I think of my long-suffering race,
For weary centuries despised, oppressed,
Enslaved and lynched, denied a human place
In the great life line of the Christian West …

This 1921 poem expresses the ‘hate’ McKay felt at the place of African Americans in US society: oppressed, enslaved, and denied a proper place in Christian society in the West, while ‘disinherited’ from their ancestral homeland in Africa.

4. ‘My Mother’.

Her hand she slowly lifted from her lap
And, smiling sadly in the old sweet way,
She pointed to the nail where hung my cap.
Her eyes said: I shall last another day.

This 1921 poem is actually two in one: two sonnets about the poet’s mother, Ann McKay, who (like Claude’s father) had been a member of the peasant class in Jamaica.

In the first sonnet, McKay recalls not wanting to leave his dying mother’s bedside and go to work in the field, but his mother insisted, telling him she would ‘last another day’. Sadly, however, his mother died while he was out.

5. ‘If We Must Die’.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot …

McKay wrote ‘If We Must Die’ in response to mob attacks by white Americans upon African-American communities during an event that became known as the Red Summer. This term was coined by the civil rights activist and author James Weldon Johnson, who organised peaceful protests in response to the racial attacks which took place in a number of cities in the US in 1919.

McKay offers a searing criticism of the racial tensions between white and black Americans, viewing the white man as a predatory presence who has power over the black man.

6. ‘Outcast’.

For the dim regions whence my fathers came
My spirit, bondaged by the body, longs.
Words felt, but never heard, my lips would frame;
My soul would sing forgotten jungle songs.

In this poem from 1922, McKay laments the fact that he has had to leave his African heritage behind and live ‘in fee’ to the white man, who pays his wages. Here is another form of ‘enslavement’, or ‘bondage’; but this sonnet concentrates on the effect that this has on the black American’s identity, torn between a land they cannot reconnect with and one they are not made to feel at home in.

7. ‘The White House’.

Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.

Although McKay later wrote of this 1922 poem, in A Long Way from Home (1937), that the title was not meant to refer to the US President’s official residence, readers cannot perhaps resist picking up on the dual meaning of ‘white house’ here.

In this poem, the ‘hate’ belongs to the white Americans who dwell within that ‘white house’: a symbol of the shuttered and locked world to which McKay and his fellow black Americans are forbidden entry.

8. ‘Africa’.

Thou ancient treasure-land, thou modern prize,
New peoples marvel at thy pyramids!
The years roll on, thy sphinx of riddle eyes
Watches the mad world with immobile lids.

This 1921 sonnet provides a concise history of the continent of Africa, the cradle of human civilisation, the birthplace of the sciences, and the land that gave the world the Great Sphinx and the Pyramids.

But Africa, McKay asserts, has had its way: darkness has ‘swallowed’ it up again, like a ‘harlot’ whose beauty and glory have faded with time.

9. ‘Tiger’.

The white man is a tiger at my throat,
Drinking my blood as my life ebbs away,
And muttering that his terrible striped coat
Is Freedom’s and portends the Light of Day.

In this poem, McKay describes the ‘white man’ as a ‘tiger at my throat’: predatory, powerful, overwhelmingly strong and fierce. Yet that characteristic tone of defiance which we find in so many of Claude McKay’s poems asserts itself once more: never, the poet tells the white man, will he ‘yield’ or submit.

10. ‘America’.

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.

McKay used the symbol of the tiger in several of his poems, although here in this 1921 poem – one of McKay’s best-known – the tiger is gendered as female, adding a potentially sexual dimension to the poem’s imagery.

This is reinforced by McKay’s use of the suggestive word ‘erect’ (‘Giving me strength erect against her hate’), and the visceral image of the female tiger penetrating the male’s throat in a reverse act of sexual dominance or violation.