Harlem Shadows

Claude McKay was born in 1890 in a little thatched house of two rooms in a beautiful valley of the hilly middle-country of Jamaica. He was born to the genial, warm, patient, neighborly farmer’s life of that island. It was a life rich in sun and sound and color and emotion, as we can see in his poems which are forever homeward yearning—in the midst of their present passion and strong will into the future, forever vividly remembering.

Like a blue-bird’s note in a March wind, those sudden clear thoughts of the warm South ring out in the midst of his northern songs. They carry a thrill into the depth of our hearts. Perhaps in some sense they are thoughts of a mother. At least it seems inevitable that we should find among them those two sacred sonnets of a child’s bereavement. It seems inevitable that a wonderful poet should have had a wise and beautiful mother.