Subway Wind
Far down, down through the city’s great gaunt gut
The gray train rushing bears the weary wind;
In the packed cars the fans the crowd’s breath cut,
Leaving the sick and heavy air behind.
And pale-cheeked children seek the upper door
To give their summer jackets to the breeze;
Their laugh is swallowed in the deafening roar
Of captive wind that moans for fields and seas;
Seas cooling warm where native schooners drift
Through sleepy waters, while gulls wheel and sweep,
Waiting for windy waves the keels to lift
Lightly among the islands of the deep;
Islands of lofty palm trees blooming white
That led their perfume to the tropic sea,
Where fields lie idle in the dew-drenched night,
And the Trades float above them fresh and free.
Source: Claude McKay: Complete Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2004)
When I started Write Right Colors Poetry in 2018, I thought I would simply draw a comic and include the pertinent poem. I followed that course with the first two poems, W.S. Merwin’s “The New Year” and Margaret Atwood’s “February.” I have chosen to alter my efforts, at least slightly, going forward.
With the next comics, I will include the poem that inspired the piece, as well as a personal reflection on the poem. I could write a critical analysis of those poems, and that would be a good and worthwhile endeavor. Analyzing Claude McKay’s poem, for instance, unearths riches, from the sound of “the city’s great gaunt gut” to the image of “lofty palm trees blooming white.” I relish that kind of work.
It’s not as though I’m abandoning that work, however, in favor of a strict “reader response.” Far from it. Rather, I wish to imagine how a poet’s culture and lived experience might have informed their work. That can’t be separated from the words that appear on the page; no, the words are the words. But the words gain an extra weight, an extra meaning, when viewed through lenses other than literary analysis.
So to Claude McKay’s “Subway Wind.” What I find myself wondering, perhaps because of a growing awareness of systemic racism in the United States, is how McKay’s experiences as a Black man influence “Subway Wind.” It’s impossible that they didn’t; our lived experiences shape every part of us, including the words we write. But we are not shaped only by what we experience directly. Our culture and heritage form us, too.
And what was Claude McKay’s culture? The legacy handed down to him? He wrote in the early 1900s, meaning he likely knew or was related to men and women who were once slaves. He probably heard racial slurs, endured threats, if not physical violence, and feared the police. His life was not one of ease, not even with his belonging to and becoming a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
Where does that struggle appear in “Subway Wind”? It seems omnipresent. The poem consists of two halves, with the first half depicting the real, and the second, the imagined. The first half depicts the “packed cars,” “the crowd’s breath cut,” “the sick and heavy air.” In this realm of the subway, which begins to feel like a dark, hellish, oppressive place as the lines plod ever onward, the train rushes, “bearing the weary wind.” Even the children, who seem like a point of hope, a point of light, lapse into silence: “Their laugh is swallowed in the deafening roar.” No one is free here, not the children, not the wind.
Everything hurtles toward an unnamed, unknown, and perhaps undesired destination. At the midpoint of the poem, the narrator describes the wind as not only weary but also captive. The wind moans for an unreachable reality, the realm of “fields and seas.” It yearns. It longs for a world where rest and silence are the custom, not the abnormality—a stark contrast to the “rushing” of the second line and the “deafening” of the seventh. Here, in this dreamscape, the only responsibilities are to be. The gulls “wheel and sweep,” the keels “lift / Lightly among the islands of the deep,” and the palm trees are “lofty,” “blooming white.” The fields are not picked, but lie “idle in the dew-drenched night.” And the wind, so weary, so captured in the first half of the poem, is utterly transformed: “the Trades float above them fresh and free.”
I can’t read this poem without thinking about slavers bent on delivering people to destinations where their laughter, like the children’s, would be snuffed, silenced. The poem perhaps even invites such a reading, with its mention of “native schooners.” I could be overreaching, but I will still posit these schooners serve as antitheses of slavers. The schooners are “native”; the slavers were foreign. They did not belong in “Seas cooling warm” or the “sleepy waters.” The schooners drift. Slavers did no such thing. They anchored at the shore and sent their men to ransack lands, pillage homes, and steal people, placing them in holds where the air most certainly was “sick and heavy.” And these slavers, like the city where the subway resides, were never satisfied. Their “gut” was great and gaunt, too. It relentlessly devoured people sent into fields that were sown and harvested, sown and harvested, forever and ever, without end.
Perhaps that’s a depressing reflection on Claude McKay’s “Subway Wind.” It might even be a highly speculative, incorrect one. But I suspect McKay was describing more than the subway experience with his words. If nothing else, his poem describes a captive, weary wind that has been contained within the strictures of subway tunnels, a wind that longs for freedom and rest. Neither of those things exist for the wind, at least not in this poem. They are only imagined. And yet, the children still laugh. They seek the upper door. And the things imagined, the things hoped for, freedom and rest, remain available, attainable. The gulls and the Trades are real objects, not idealized or mythic ones, and they are altogether worth striving for.