Harlem Dancer by Claude McKay

Claude McKay was born in 1890 in Jamaica.  He was a novelist, journalist, and a poet.  He was well educated and avid reader. Through his readings, he was able to compose poems at an early age of ten. As he grew up, he was greatly influenced by his mentor, Walter Jekyll, who was an Englishman. He encouraged McKay to write dialect verse.

After migrating to America, McKay encountered the harsh reality of racism which greatly influenced his writings later on. He settled in Kansas and later to New York.  He married his old time friend Eulalie Imelda Lewars. Lewars went back to Jamaica to deliver their daughter. McKay had to do various manual jobs before eventually managing to publish his two early poems; the Harlem Dancer and Invocation in 1917. His lyric poems earned him fame and recognition.

The poem the ‘Harlem Dancer ‘ is an imagery poem.  The structure of the poem is in a single stanza. It has rhyming words at the end of each line which alternate.  For example, the words that rhyme are prostitutes and flutes, sway and day, palm and calm, form and storm and so on. The words match to form an alteration. It talks of a crowd of girls and boys staring at a beautiful woman dancing.  This signifies the need to go beyond the physical appearance. The poem says that the Harlem dancer has a falsely  smiling face yet  she  knew  she is  a  place  familiar  to  her(McKay, 23). This means that the beautiful Harlem dancer knows that she is often judged by her physical appearance rather than the mind she has. This aspect is connoting the racial discrimination the poet experienced when he came to the US.  He is against the concept of judging a book by its cover more than what actually the person has to give.  He believes that human beings have something unique and special no matter the race or color of the skin.

The poem talks of a lovely and beautiful woman who can entertain people with her dancing and appearance.  The woman does not however, like or interested with the kind of job she does.  She is simply doing to make ends meet.  She is not even happy but covers it up by smiling. The author then presents that deep inside her; she is not excited and also sad.  She sways like a tree in her slow dancing which represents the tribulations and trials she has to undergo to make her strong and successful.

The speaker of the poem is an observer and admirer in the crowd. He vividly describes the Harlem dancer to the reader’s imagination. The setting of the play is most likely to be in the evening where people relax and get entertained. There is dancing, drinking and merry making. The poem address the hard times of urbanization where women can offer to dance against her will in order to improve her living condition. It is also a period of racial discrimination in the US where individuals were being judged by their appearance rather than intellectual capability. The message of the poem is to stop judging a books by it cover and therefore the main theme is antiracism (Tillery, 1994).

Reference

Giles, F (2000) Modern American poetry: Claude McKay’s Life. Retrieved from

 http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/mckay/life.htm

On August 3, 2010

Claude Mckay Home to Harlem, Publisher UPNE,

Maxwell W(2004)Complete poems, American poetry recovery  series,
Publisher University of Illinois Press,

Tillery, T (1994) Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity, Publisher Univ of Massachusetts Press,

The Harlem Dancer’is reprinted from Harlem Shadows. Claude McKay. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922.  Retrieved from

http://www.poetry-archive.com/m/the_harlem_dancer.html

On August 3, 2010

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