With this article, Poetry begins featuring a poet whose birthday falls in the current month. Born September 15, 1889, Claude McKay is a featured poet for September.
Claude McKay came to the United States in 1912 from Jamaica.
McKay’s speaker in his sonnet, “America,” dramatizes both love and hate for his adopted country. McKay’s sonnet is an English sonnet with the traditional three quatrains and couplet. It has the traditional English sonnet rime scheme ABABCDCDEFEFGG. And while McKay’s talent is considerable, the sonnet does have serious flaws.
First Quatrain: “Although she feeds me bread of bitterness”
The speaker, in his zeal to dramatize his mixed emotions toward “America,” commits the error of constructing an absurd mixed metaphor in the first two lines: “Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, / And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth.” The speaker fashions a being who feeds him lousy food, “bread of bitterness,” and then becomes a tiger that catches him by the throat ripping the life out of him.
This metaphor fails on two accounts: it is impossible to fathom a tiger offering “bread” of any sort, bitter or otherwise, to a potential victim. Yet going past this absurdity, the reader understands that once the tiger has ripped the victim’s throat, the victim would be dead and incapable of uttering anything further, much less the ridiculous line “I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!”
On the one hand, it seems a wonderful endorsement that the speaker “loves” this country and seems strengthened that it “tests [his] youth.” On the other, however, calling the place a “cultured hell” negates that very claim.
Second Quatrain: “Her vigor flows like tides into my blood”
In the second quatrain, the speaker seems to offer reasons for positive feelings toward “America”: she is vigorous and big. And even though her vigor seems to invigorate him, it actually just motivates him to stand up “against her hate.” The line “Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,” splits itself between the second and third quatrain, a technical flaw that is not supported by the context.
Third Quatrain: “I stand within her walls with not a shred”
The third quatrain is almost laughable, because it is so contradictory. The speaker has himself standing like a rebel in front of a “king” within “walls.” Of course, America has never had a king, much less a king who has walled himself off from the rest of his country.
The speaker claims that he stands there against this walled king, but he feels no “terror, malice” and he has no intention of “jeer[ing]” this “cultured hell” that he loves. However, the poem fairly drips with terror, malice, and jeering as it executes its mixed messages.
In the third quatrain’s third and fourth lines and in the couplet, the speaker makes a prediction that is also dripping with the venom this speaker is at once trying to spew forth and keep well hidden.
Couplet: “Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand”
The speaker predicts as “Darkly [he] gaze[s] into the days ahead” that the greatness and mightiness of “America,” those “priceless treasures,” will sink into the sand. That he chooses sand is unfortunate, since the soil of the United States does not consist primarily of that type.
