18 pages • 36-minute read
When Dawn Comes to the City
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Literary Devices
Form
The four stanzas reflect a navigation between formal poetry with anticipated rhythms and carefully modulated rhymes, and what in McKay’s era was termed open verse, which allowed the subject matter to be defined by poetic form released from the expectations of traditional rhythm and rhyme.
Stanzas 1 and 3 are set in the city that, for the speaker, suggests soul-quashing monotony, a bleak gray world defined by the routine of work-to-tenement-to-work in which the intrusion of dawn signals only a return to the crushing routine. Appropriately, those stanzas are locked into careful beat and predictable rhymes, echoing the thematic argument. Stanzas 2 and 4 are set on the island, and the form of the lines is as liberated as the speaker’s spirit back on the island. The poem uses the energy of open verse to create sonic cooperation, patterns that suggest rather than insist on form: the “ing” verbals in those triplets; the repeated first word “And” like a chant; and the onomatopoeic devices, those words such as “bray,” “neigh,” and “crow” whose sound echoes the actual noise they are describing.
In this, McKay exhibits a command of both the demands of inherited conservative poetic form and the subtle aural effects of open verse.
Meter
Given the poem’s shuttling between two different environments—the city and the island—the meter maintained in the alternating stanzas is determined by the setting and abides by the general thematic idea that the city is claustrophobic and the island is free and open.
The two stanzas set in New York maintain a martial beat. Each line manipulates iambic meter, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. If read aloud, these two stanzas invite a locked-in, mechanical recitation. There is just enough variation to create monotony—and that is thematically the vision of the modern urban world where the speaker lives.
The meter loosens within the island stanzas. In fact, there are metrical patterns. If read aloud, the second and fourth stanzas simply cannot be read with percussive patterning—the recitation, like the life the poem depicts on the island, relaxes into casual rhythms, the ab-libbed meter that summarizes life on the island. The recurring “ing” verbals give the stanzas some kind of structure, but when the triads are read aloud, they invite different inflections every time. The lines tumble one into the other like the stream “falling / Sheer upon the flat rocks” (Lines 19-20). In short, the metrics of the city sections restrict; the metrics of the island sections liberate, invite, and expand.
Voice
Although much of McKay’s contemporary reputation rests on his poetry that during the mid- to late-1920s explored the position of Black people in racist America, McKay early on distinguished himself via a variety of voices in his poetry. Educated informally through the agency of his older brother and introduced to the landmark works of British poetry from the century before, McKay was a Romantic at heart; however, he was a Modernist by temperament because he was discontented with the sociopolitical realities of his adopted America and restlessly searching through the artistic capitals of Europe in the years immediately after World War I. His early work reflects this command of multiple voices. His first published collection, Songs of Jamaica, for instance, recreated the West Indian dialect of his native country. In Spring in New Hampshire, his second volume in which “When Dawn Comes to the City” first appeared, McKay revealed his command of the conventional, conservative poetic line of the Romantic poets he admired, such as William Wordsworth and John Keats. That is the voice heard in Stanzas 1 and 3.
In this poem, McKay also revealed his command of the voice of the Modernist movement in that he upends inherited forms of prosody and forges an original poetic line, one that reflects the poem’s theme. That sense of the organic oneness of a poem’s sound and sense, how its dual voices created, nevertheless, a single impression (like a symphony altering its tempo and tone despite maintaining the integrity of its design) reflects McKay’s embrace of the freedom of Modernism and the possibilities of a poem’s multiple voices.
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