The Tropics in New York

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1922

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Tropical

Although the title announces that the poem is set in New York, the recurring motif is the speaker’s tropical or semitropical homeland. Other than establishing the location outside a grocery store that has a window display, the images in the first two stanzas point away from the city. The grocery store has merely imported its display of fruit from somewhere else, and that other location is the exclusive focus of Lines 6-8. Those lines evoke an enchanting country setting far away from what one imagines is a bleak city street. The details of that street (other than the enticing shop window) are left to the imagination because the poet gives them no attention. It is the lure of the tropical locale that draws him on, and it is the vividness of it that remains in the speaker’s mind in the final stanza, in which he also returns to an awareness of his own present circumstances. The featureless street serves only as the place—the not-tropical, the not-fondly remembered—where his sorrow and regret are finally placed on view.

Pastoral

The pastoral motif runs through the poem. According to M. H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms (4th edition, 1981), a pastoral poem expresses “an urban poet’s nostalgic image of the peace and simplicity of the life of shepherds and other rural folk in an idealized natural setting” (p. 127). Christopher Marlowe’s late-16th-century poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is an example of a pastoral poem, as is Andrew Marvell’s 17th-century “The Garden.” William Shakespeare’s play As You Like It is a celebration of life in the forest of Arden, where happiness abounds, weary travelers are rejuvenated, and everything always works out for the best, in sharp contrast to life in the court (city), where human nature presents itself at its worst.

McKay seems fully at home in the pastoral tradition. The pastoral element in “The Tropics in New York” consists of the speaker’s nostalgia of an idealized country setting; much of the effect is gained by the implied contrast with life in the city. This is typical of McKay’s work; he likes to present pastoral scenes but almost always heightens the effect by contrasting them with the less desirable alternative. Rarely if ever in McKay’s poetry does the city emerge as a more attractive option for human life than living with ease and enjoyment under a Caribbean sun.

Time

Time is the hidden actor or process responsible for the poem’s emotional effect. The passage of time is implied in two of the poem’s major themes: nostalgia, which looks back to the past; and the experience of the immigrant, who has been delivered to a country far from the place of his birth by the inexorable passage of time, which is synonymous with change. It is time—the passage of many years—that has led the speaker away from a sense of belonging to one of alienation. It is time that has produced in him such a fierce yearning to unravel or reverse its effects. Yet he must also know, as all humans must, that no one can turn back the tide of time. To be alive is to experience change, not all of it to one’s liking. In Stanza 3, the speaker in the New York City street weeps for himself and for the human condition, the passage from youth to age, the acquisition of so many potent memories, and all the yearnings, impossible to fulfill, that such a rough and unpredictable passage involves.