Joy in the Woods

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.