18 pages • 36-minute read
When Dawn Comes to the City
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Symbols & Motifs
Dawn
Given the poet’s freedom to select any time of day for the poem, dawn emerges as a powerful symbol that suggests one thing in the city and something different on the island. Dawn is traditionally associated with new beginnings, renewal, and the hope that energizes the arrival of a new day. Breaking the hard dark of night, with its suggestion of fear and anxiety, dawn brings the restoration of hope and promise. The coming of dawn’s light is associated with illumination, insight, and epiphany.
In the stanzas set in the city, however, dawn is decidedly ironic. The coming of the new day does not bode new beginnings but rather the inevitable return to the monotony of routine. The colors are muted and dark; movement is sparse and slow, tired and groaning; what few figures populate the city at dawn are remote, lonely, and, despite the breaking morning, already physically and spiritually tired. The city, then, works against the promise of dawn. That is, the sad epiphany the dawn offers the speaker in the tenement world.
On the island, however, that world works with, not against, the premise of dawn. That world reanimates, meets the promise of the new day with a return to energy. The stanzas set in the island world are alive with noise, bright with color, and, important given the soul-oppressive reality of the city, bankrupt of people. It is nature responding to the return of the sun, the vanquishing of night, and the restoration of new beginnings. Unlike the city, defined by the monotony of routine, the island world reminds the speaker of the cyclic energy of the organic world, each day replenishing itself, hence all the “ing” verbals that suggest ongoing animation. Therein the speaker finds the hope of the natural world—of course, the irony is that such hope, energy, and animation is the stuff of his memory.
The “Nannie” Goat
The description of the island highlights a nanny goat in ways that might distinguish the goat from the other animals in the poem. The goat is given four lines in Stanza 2 (Lines 17-20) and four lines in Stanza 4 (Lines 39-42), and these descriptions occur at the most prominent place: the end of the poet’s litany of island animal life. It is tempting—and many McKay readers have done exactly this—to freight that goat with intricate and even complex symbolic value. After all, goats, as most animals do, bring with them levels of cultural interpretation. Depending on the culture, goats have been associated with dark magic and Satanic worship, with sexual appetite, with robust health and life-embracing energy, with confidence in precarious circumstances, with the freedom of the creative artist, and with deep spiritual calm.
However, life on the island defeats the over-exertion of the intellect suggested by such inventive levels of interpretation, which have nothing to do with the nanny goat and everything to do with the cleverness of the interpreter. In that, such elaborate symbolic readings of the animal belong more to the over-complicated city. On the island, the goat is the last image offered because it is the last thing the speaker notes; it is uncomplicated by intellectual overdrive. The goat is an accidental collision of shapes, colors, and dimensions that are part of a world that is splendid exactly because it does not need to symbolize anything more beyond its existence.
The Whistling Newsboy
The newsboy, introduced as part of the gray early morning urban setting offered in the third stanza (Lines 27-28), epitomizes the urgent sense of the “now” that compels the city and is decidedly ironic on the island. The newspaper is also capable of shrinking the world and creating connections where there are none. This newsboy is lonely, by himself crossing the empty streets, whistling a tune to keep himself company. The island, however, is uncomplicated by news and instead compelled by wonder, color, beauty, and magic. The poem offers a sense of an entire island culture immersed in the unbounded, joyous energy of nature, a culture that is now lost to the speaker.
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