When Dawn Comes to the City

The four stanzas reflect a navigation between formal poetry with anticipated rhythms and carefully modulated rhymes, and what in McKay’s era was termed open verse, which allowed the subject matter to be defined by poetic form released from the expectations of traditional rhythm and rhyme.

Stanzas 1 and 3 are set in the city that, for the speaker, suggests soul-quashing monotony, a bleak gray world defined by the routine of work-to-tenement-to-work in which the intrusion of dawn signals only a return to the crushing routine. Appropriately, those stanzas are locked into careful beat and predictable rhymes, echoing the thematic argument. Stanzas 2 and 4 are set on the island, and the form of the lines is as liberated as the speaker’s spirit back on the island. The poem uses the energy of open verse to create sonic cooperation, patterns that suggest rather than insist on form: the “ing” verbals in those triplets; the repeated first word “And” like a chant; and the onomatopoeic devices, those words such as “bray,” “neigh,” and “crow” whose sound echoes the actual noise they are describing.

In this, McKay exhibits a command of both the demands of inherited conservative poetic form and the subtle aural effects of open verse.