More on Claude McKay

The exile theme recurs in many of Claude McKay's works. The Jamaican landscape and the yearning to return were prominent in many of his poems. Today, I will feature two more of his poems that are among my favorite. The first speaks of a promise to return home, and the other describes the lovely Spanish Needle flower which seemed to remind him so much of his Jamaican childhood.

I Shall Return

I shall return again; I shall return
To laugh and love and watch with wonder-eyes
At golden noon the forest fires burn,
Wafting their blue-black smoke to sapphire skies.
I shall return to loiter by the streams
That bathe the brown blades of the bending grasses,
And realize once more my thousand dreams
Of waters rushing down the mountain passes.
I shall return to hear the fiddle and fife
Of village dances, dear delicious tunes
That stir the hidden depths of native life,
Stray melodies of dim remembered runes.
I shall return, I shall return again,
To ease my mind of long, long years of pain.

The Spanish Needle

Lovely dainty Spanish needle
With your yellow flower and white,
Dew bedecked and softly sleeping,
Do you think of me to-night?

Shadowed by the spreading mango,
Nodding o'er the rippling stream,
Tell me, dear plant of my childhood,
Do you of the exile dream?

Do you see me by the brook's side
Catching crayfish 'neath the stone,
As you did the day you whispered:
Leave the harmless dears alone?

Do you see me in the meadow
Coming from the woodland spring
With a bamboo on my shoulder
And a pail slung from a string?

Do you see me all expectant
Lying in an orange grove,
While the swee-swees sing above me,
Waiting for my elf-eyed love?

Lovely dainty Spanish needle,
Source to me of sweet delight,
In your far-off sunny southland
Do you dream of me to-night?

Claude McKay

He was central to the Harlem Renaissance. William Churchill quoted his poem, If We Must Die, during World War 2. Although he became an American citizen, many people still believe Claude McKay was American-born.

However, Claude McKay was a Jamaican poet whose works inspired millions. His poems were daring and defiant, yet at the same time, they conveyed a nostalgic yearning for his native Jamaica. Claude McKay was born on September 15, 1890 in Clarendon, Jamaica. He never returned home to the land he loved and wrote so much about in his poems, and died in Chicago in 1948.

I am very pleased to feature Claude McKay as my poet of the month for November, and to share with you perhaps his most famous poem, If We Must Die. 

If We Must Die.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
hunted and penned in an inglorious spot
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs
making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed 
in vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!


Here are some more details on the life of Claude McKay from the website, Modern American Poetry.

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