Born in Jamaica, the lyric poet Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a prominent voice in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. A Communist in his youth, yet drawn by an intuition of divine mystery, he ultimately experienced a conversion to Catholicism. The best of his poems engage the tension between the large conversation of the poetic tradition in English and his own desire for a place inscribed in that tradition. “After the Winter,” for example, combines the alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines of common meter with a re-imagining of Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” in a seasonless Jamaican paradise set apart not only from the anxious contingencies of urban life, but from time itself.

AFTER THE WINTER
by Claude McKay

Some day, when trees have shed their leaves
     And against the morning’s white
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
     Have sheltered for the night,
We’ll turn our faces southward, love,
     Toward the summer isle
Where bamboos spire the shafted grove
     And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill
     Where towers the cotton tree,
And leaps the laughing crystal rill,
     And works the droning bee.
And we will build a cottage there
     Beside an open glade,
With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,
     And ferns that never fade.

———————————————

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, with the help of a North Carolina poet, Sally Thomas. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.