When Dawn Comes to the City

The poem is centrally about moving to a new country and the struggle to fit in. Behind the speaker’s struggle is the assumption that people are defined by where they live. “When Dawn Comes to the City” is an unsettling exploration of the pain and panic of homesickness. The poet does not offer autobiographical context to explain the implications of the poem’s description. The poem, however, uses the juxtaposition of two settings—dawn in New York and dawn on an unnamed island—to express the emotional mindset of a first-generation immigrant at odds with his adopted country. He is distant from his native country because it has become less of a real-time geographical place and more of a fantasy, idealized and accessible only in moments of interior escape.

The poem investigates two different perspectives: documentarian realism and lyrical romanticism. New York is named because it is the setting of the poem; Jamaica is never mentioned by name because it feels unreal, distant, and inaccessible. For a first-generation immigrant, homesickness involves at its core questions about identity and specifically the relationship between the self and place. Homesickness involves a sense of feeling lost, a free-floating anxiety over the persistent feeling of suspension between two places; one’s identity starts to feel like an unreliable construct.

At the time of the poem’s composition, McKay was part of the burgeoning Black arts movement centered in New York’s Harlem district. When McKay first arrived in America, he lived in the South and Midwest while he pursued his education, which showed him firsthand the realities of racism in America and contributed to his sense of not belonging. The theme of homesickness in the poem then emerges as a far more discomforting psychological trauma: McKay, born in Jamaica, was living in an America widely promoted as the land of opportunity and success, but what McKay found there was racism, bigotry, and institutionalized discrimination. The poem reflects this coldness, disappointment, displacement, and isolation; the speaker is never entirely at home in urban America and wistfully yearns for his home and the past. The speaker says of the island home lost to him, “I would be on the island of the sea / In the heart of the island of the sea” (Lines 31-32). The “would be” denoting the futility of his fantasy, the impossibility of returning, a verb construct more pulled to the past than to the future. I would be, he admits tacitly, if I could be.

The alternating stanzas pivot from realism to romanticism. The stanzas set in the city are rigidly metered with a predictable rhyme scheme and a percussive beat—all to capture the grim repetitive monotony of life in the city. The speaker is interred in the cold and dark elements of his adopted city. Its loneliness is encapsulated by the lone figure of the newsboy hurrying through the streets under “the dying stars” (Line 26). The “red streaks” (Line 29) that cut across the otherwise gray skies suggest a laceration to the dawn, at once violent and startling, as if the sun must stab its way into the night, the hanging darkness reluctant to depart.

Given the oppressive reality of the city in which he is interred, the speaker’s only escape is to imagine dawn in the place where he longs to be. The stanzas that describe the island morning are not rigidly measured. The free-verse constructions of the lines reflect the liberation that the island world offers. The speaker emphasizes the noises of the island stirring to life to give the island morning an intensity and an immediacy unlike the cavernous quiet of the dismal city. The speaker’s imaginative abandonment and surrender to revelry are suggested by the exclamation points (first in Lines 20-21 and again in Lines 42-43). The speaker does not exude the same excitement in the stanzas about the city. In accord with the psychology of homesickness, the happiest parts of the poem are, in the end, the saddest because they are the raw stuff of fantasy.