Joy in the Woods

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1922

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Those Bad Shoes

Bad shoes (Line 14) symbolize the claustrophobic prison of capitalism. Claude McKay’s peripatetic life gives credence to the cliché that life is a journey. Born and raised in the Caribbean, McKay moved restlessly throughout his adult life, living for a time in the Deep South, the Midwest, New York, Amsterdam, Brussels, London, and finally in Chicago. That life journey, in turn, created a telling metaphor for McKay’s own spiritual journey, his restless testing of a variety of “isms” in his efforts to advocate for the evolution away from what he saw as the great evil of the human condition—spiritual enslavement.

Given McKay’s embrace of life as full of possibility and evolution, that the speaker in the poem specifically notes his “bad shoes” that “hurt” (Line 14) suggests the speaker’s diminished life is closed off to possibility. Bad shoes symbolize the lack of any viable horizon, even the hope of change. The shoes, the speaker admits, hurt his feet. He is incapable of authentic journeying. The bad shoes are sufficient only to get him to work. The tantalizing possibilities of life settle into the dreary reality of existence as an insignificant cog within the vast, depersonalizing machinery of capitalism. The bad shoes reveal the speaker is going nowhere and doing it every day.

“Life-Giving Air”

There is an unsettling danger to capitalism easily lost in a poem that so giddily celebrates the careless beauties of nature. The details of the jungle world that the speaker summons, presumably on his way to work, are traditional elements of that world: birds, crops, flowers, trees, rain, sun, each physical detail generously endowed with adjectives that suggest animation, fertility, and freedom. Amid that evocation of the world of the land, however, the speaker offers a detail that seems strangely, even oddly out of pace: “fresh and life-giving air” (Line 26).

That single detail, however, symbolizes what is truly at stake for McKay in his assessment of the dangers of the capitalist culture. It is not just about pretty flowers or the happy tunes of birds. City life and factory work, which in McKay's poem are oppressive and depersonalizing spheres committed to using people as units of human resource, threaten the very life of the workers who see no other way to live than surrendering to such emotional and spiritual enslavement. Capitalism is metaphorically if not literally killing its own workers. Capitalism becomes like some virus destroying the very thing that gives it life. If the life-giving air (Line 26) with which the speaker gifts the poem is absent, then the ever-narrowing, airless streets of the sprawling city through which the speaker trudges in his ugly clothes and his uncomfortable shoes symbolically suggest the bleak endgame that the working class must play out.

The verb IS

If only the idyllic natural world that the poet conjures was a memory, the tenor and tone of the poem would be radically altered. Then the world of such animation and abundance, such stunning color and amazing sensual overload would be a healthy memory, a recollection of a time and place that gives the soul a tonic boost. The poem, then, would be considerably different if the opening line was cased in the past tense: “There was.” What worker heading off to another pointless and unrewarding day at work does not give pause to remember a time and place that enlivened rather than enervated their soul?

The poem, however, casts its tonic world in the present tense. The world therefore exists in the present, “just now” (Line 1). The present tense symbolizes the heartbreaking distance the speaker is from what would give color and purpose to his life. A colorful world exists, yes, but it does so beyond the speaker's reach. The use of the present tense makes that world taunting rather than tantalizing, a pointless craving rather than a blessed refuge. After all, the speaker is “hired” (Line 10), and the conditions of his enslavement make life unbearably thin. Locked within the unchanging present tense, it is a life without the comfort of memories and without the energy of hope in any horizon, a life forever in the present tense. The present tense thus makes the solution to the emotional despair of capitalism at once near and distant, there but not there.