Joy in the Woods

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1922

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Enslavement of Work

The speaker in “Joy in the Woods” laments early on that he is “hired” (Line 10), that is, he has been sold, at least figuratively, to work: “On my brow an unfading frown / And hate in my heart always” (Lines 7, 8). There are perhaps no more powerful words in McKay’s lamentation over the enslavement of work than “unfading” and “always” (Lines 7,8). The speaker's condition will never improve, never change, never satisfy. McKay, whose father proudly traced his ancestral roots to West Africa, and who sojourned throughout the American South after he emigrated from Jamaica, does not use the metaphor of enslavement lightly. McKay understood the reality of slavery, chaining generations of Africans and compelling them to work in brutal conditions in the Deep South without hope of ever being released from that onerous life on the pain of being hunted down like animals.

If modern work does not absolutely follow that grim historical model, McKay argues, it is only a difference in degree, not of kind. The poem poses anything but rhetorical questions. If the modern worker cannot choose not to work, what is the alternative? Where is the worker to go? How would the worker provide for himself or his family? Where is the freedom? Just to survive in a capitalist culture—and prospering is not even an option—with something to eat, something to wear, and a place to live requires wholly abandoning the heart and the soul, allowing them to fade into irony: “Forced to go on through fear / For every day I must eat” (Lines 11, 12). The alternative to work—unemployment—is even grimmer. The routine will never end, and no emotion—not regret, or sorrow, or anger—is tolerable or even necessary. The speaker confirms this, saying, “[a] slave should never grow tired” (Line 19), suggesting that what is necessary is just donkey endurance. In this, the poem suggests that whatever goods or services the worker provides—and McKay draws on a variety of blue collars jobs he worked, including factory work, civil service, and food service—is soul-sapping and heart-deadening, leaving the worker alive in name only.

The Tonic Wonder of Nature

There is no doubt where the speaker, a worker-cog, finds solace: in the tonic wonder of the land, nature unbounded and unscripted. The joy the speaker feels in the release into the green, fecund world of animated fertility, stunning color, and sweet, fresh air--all transcribed by the melodies of songbirds--reveals by inference the work world toward which he is heading in his ill-fitting clothes and his so-called ugly shoes. It is a factory world, dark and closed in, that drags heavy with the sorrows of those who thanklessly toil to make that machine-world productive.

Of course, the idyllic world the speaker conjures is never made specific—it is perhaps the Caribbean world of McKay’s own childhood, but it is a larger, broader, more therapeutic sense of the land than merely McKay’s Jamaican home. Nature symbolizes everything that the city is not. After all, America was a scant generation removed from its agrarian roots. The sprawl of the city and the concentration of so much humanity within the tight and narrow streets of a city was still, at the time McKay was writing, a relatively new and vaguely threatening thing.

Hence, the natural world McKay creates is dazzled by pixie-dust touches that elevate it to the magical rather than the realistic. The birds make merry; the spring never ends; its air is life-giving; its florescence of green leaves nothing less than manifestations of music; the tree blossoms exude a sweet perfume; and gentle rains keep the Edenic world ever-pristine and ever-clean. This, the speaker laments, is what we, the working class itself, have been forced to abandon to attend to the busyness of work. Nature—the woods, the flowers, the birds—is both there and not there, at once a compelling presence and an unsettling absence.

The Consolation of the Imagination

If the poem invokes so forthrightly the language of slavery to depict the contemporary work culture, where is the offer of emancipation? Where is freedom? It would be ideal to say the poem, recognizing the burden of work and the crushing reality of its drudgery, advocates time away from its confines, a day at the beach, for instance, a picnic in the park, or a soul-reanimating interlude devoted to returning to nature. But the poem, because it so idealizes the natural world where the speaker finds refuge, cannot make such a simple offer. The speaker understands that the physical engagement of a world so distant, so estranged from the workday world of the city, is no solution. After all, a weekend-away inevitably involves the anxiety of Monday morning.

For McKay, an earnest and uncompromising critic of the capitalist system, the only consolation is really no consolation at all: the fantasy of some place apart. But the argument of the poem extends well beyond that conjuring: For this worker, the place apart is staying home, in bed, asleep; for others, it is a favorite fishing spot, a bustling casino, a crowded mall, the welcoming un-reality of a theme park or a ball park, perhaps lingering over breakfast, perhaps playing with your kids at a park, perhaps evacuating into the sweet non-reality of video gaming—the poem offers the imagination able to create a world that is not the work world, a life-giving world of idealized perfection into which a worker can, at least for a moment, slip into. Yes, work calls. Yes, the speaker understands he will work today, relentlessly and grimly, until he will collapse in bed that evening “toil-tired” (Line 29), only to get up tomorrow and do it again. But the sanctuary-retreat of the jungle world exists if only in his head and, absent the means or the opportunity to actually go there, the imagination must be consolation enough. Through the agency of the unfettered imagination, the speaker argues, those who do the work have the right to beauty, life, and freedom.