Joy in the Woods

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1922

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

The poem’s form reveals that McKay understands his working-class audience. Despite McKay’s childhood growing up amid the evidence of the socio-political damage incurred by Jamaica—really the entire Caribbean Basin—after two centuries of ruthless British colonial occupation, and despite his dissatisfaction with the status quo in his adopted (white) America, McKay elects to case his concern over the oppression of the capitalist culture through the vehicle of poetic forms grounded in the very British/white culture that so plagued his world.

One reason for McKay’s poetic form choices is that they elevate the quiet tragedies of the American working-class “stiff.” The poem looks like a poem, scans like a poem. It is executed in three octets (eight-line stanzas), with rhyming couplets in between each octet that echo one another and use the rhyme device of “tired” and “hired” (Lines 9, 10, 19, 20, 29, 30), creating a sort of refrain to the poem. How best to capture the poet’s sense of loss, the emptiness he feels trapped within the soul-draining routine of his working world? The poem rejects the idea of pitying the speaker by delivering his dilemma in a poetic form that creates from his yearning, his sense of living death, and his deep frustration over the limits of his life a stately and grand form. In this, McKay’s speaker may be spiritually broken, yes, but he still has the requisite energy to shape from that sense of loss an alternate reality that manifests the very things his sad working-class world lacks: order, design, grandness, and dignity.

But there is nothing “grand” in McKay’s lines. His poetic lines are direct and realistic, referencing his ugly clothes, his perpetual frown, and his bad shoes. In this, McKay refuses ornamental diction, convoluted syntax, elaborate figures of speech—all typical of the British models he studied. Within his own elevated form, then, the language of the poem itself is direct, accessible, familiar, and pedestrian. The form reflects McKay’s own status: a working-class poet.

Meter

If “Joy in the Woods” is approached as a kind of song of the working class, the meter of the lines is steady and regular, like a ballad or a chant. The poem is non-threatening and inviting. The meter is strikingly accessible: duh-DUH, duh-DUH, duh-DUH, duh-DUH. The beat is for the most part iambic tetrameter. Each line is delivered in four two-beat units. It is a most familiar and even conversational meter. That accessibility is enhanced by the poem’s traditional rhyming pattern: ABABCDCD EE. The recitation is coaxing and easy. The lines moving through the familiar duh-DUH pattern along with the quiet and unforced rhyme encourages the lilting voice of street speech itself. In recitation, the metric pattern does not sound like poetry. The rhythm, although regular, offers moments within some lines—underscored through the use of hyphens and exclamation points and question marks and long vowels and sonorous s’s—that slow down the line or speed up the recitation. Thus, the poem avoids the hypnotic effect implicit in such strict meter, and the poem offers moments when the beat is set aside, moments when the speaker examines with brutal honesty the conditions of his life or hymns the joys of a natural world he is denied. Those moments of intensity (e.g., Lines 10, 16, 18, 21) are broken by pauses that create the effect of the speaker at moments of intense vulnerability, his own voice failing him. The meter captures both the raw strength of the worker and his willingness to go on, as well as the fragile heart of the poet devastated by that very willingness.

The Speaker

The speaker, even as he acknowledges the onerous reality of his working-class world, reveals in his argument how, despite those limitations, his heart and soul still function.

To make consumer capitalism work, McKay argues that the workers themselves have to be reduced to objects, “man-machine[s]” (Line 29). The humanity of workers needs to be denied to allow the perpetuation of the capitalist machine itself. As a man-machine, the speaker then ought to be dedicated to the tasks of his work. The question of whether the speaker finds reward in that commitment is irrelevant. A machine is valuable because it resists such inward reflection. The only respite the man-machine gets is after a shift. “[T]oil-tired” (Line 29), the machine returns to its home, there to be reanimated by sleep before returning the next day to begin the cycle of work all over. The speaker acknowledges he is a “mere drudge” (Line 16), powerless to do anything to rescue himself and thus left with two equally unworkable alternatives, self-pity and suicide.

However, McKay allows the speaker’s own rhetoric to reveal the dirty secret that capitalist America denies: the profound humanity of the workers it reduces to commodities. The speaker waxes poetic over the jungle world, the lines sparkle with color and energy, animation and sensuality. The third octet alone reveals the speaker’s sense of the vivid immediacy of the jungle he conjures from the kinetics of his imagination. The speaker demonstrates that, yes, he is bound within the claustrophobic confines of his working-class prison, but deep inside, he still yearns, still craves beauty. Capitalism cannot destroy the speaker’s soul.