When Dawn Comes to the City

 The tired cars go grumbling by,
        The moaning, groaning cars,
    And the old milk carts go rumbling by
        Under the same dull stars.
    Out of the tenements, cold as stone,
        Dark figures start for work;
    I watch them sadly shuffle on,
        ’Tis dawn, dawn in New York.

        But I would be on the island of the sea,
        In the heart of the island of the sea,
    Where the cocks are crowing, crowing, crowing,
    And the hens are cackling in the rose-apple tree,
Where the old draft-horse is neighing, neighing, neighing,
        Out on the brown dew-silvered lawn,
    And the tethered cow is lowing, lowing, lowing,
And dear old Ned is braying, braying, braying,
And the shaggy Nannie goat is calling, calling, calling
    From her little trampled corner of the long wide lea
That stretches to the waters of the hill-stream falling
    Sheer upon the flat rocks joyously!
    There, oh, there! on the island of the sea,
        There I would be at dawn.

    The tired cars go grumbling by,
        The crazy, lazy cars,
    And the same milk carts go rumbling by
        Under the dying stars.
    A lonely newsboy hurries by,
        Humming a recent ditty;
    Red streaks strike through the gray of the sky,
        The dawn comes to the city.

        But I would be on the island of the sea,
        In the heart of the island of the sea,
    Where the cocks are crowing, crowing, crowing,
    And the hens are cackling in the rose-apple tree,
Where the old draft-horse is neighing, neighing, neighing
        Out on the brown dew-silvered lawn,
    And the tethered cow is lowing, lowing, lowing,
And dear old Ned is braying, braying, braying,
And the shaggy Nannie goat is calling, calling, calling,
    From her little trampled corner of the long wide lea
That stretches to the waters of the hill-stream falling
    Sheer upon the flat rocks joyously!
    There, oh, there! on the island of the sea,
        There I would be at dawn.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 5, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“When Dawn Comes to the City” was first published in the June 1920 issue of Cambridge Magazine, and reappeared later the same year in Claude McKay’s collection Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (Grant Richards, 1920). The poem was also published in McKay’s later collection, Harlem Shadows (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922). Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang, in “Pastoral and the Problem of Place in Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows,” published in A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Wiley, 2015), writes that the poem “alternates between New York City and [McKay’s homeland of] Jamaica, and the stanzas alternate depictions of the contrasting environments of these two islands. [. . .] [T]he New York stanzas are eight lines, the Jamaica stanzas are fourteen lines, and this leap from an octave to a balladic sonnet, from a fragment to a whole song, parallels the poet-speaker’s emotional attention. [. . .] Two sonnets and two geographical locations collaborate to construct one uniquely American topography; in this way “When Dawn Comes to the City” marks the divergent experiences of place that can converge in one poem, and McKay’s fusing of New York and Jamaica begins to suggest the meaningful complexity of reading Harlem as a location of multiple cultures and geographies.”