The Harlem Dancer by Claude McKay is a poem expressing the poet's own deep loneliness and alienation as reflected in the dancer it features. At first glance, the poem appears to be McKay writing about the plight of some poor girl alienated from her work as a dancer in a club, even as she wows and entertains the crowd.
However, a more careful reading shows that the poet is seeing in the dancer’s plight his own predicament as a deracinated person living in a strange land. Read on to learn more. The poem in its depiction of Harlem nightlife was a precursor to the themes of Harlem Rennaisance poetry.
1. Full text of the poem
Here is the full text of the poem. The bracketed numbers (i.e.,[5]) indicated the number of the lines, which will be frequently referenced in the text of this analysis.
Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes
And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.
She sang and danced on gracefully and calm, [5]
The light gauze hanging loose about her form;
To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.
Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls
Luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise, [10]
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;
But looking at her falsely-smiling face,
I knew her self was not in that strange place.
"The Harlem Dancer" was first published in 1917 in the magazine Seven Arts. McKay published the poem together with another sonnet called "Invocation" using the pen name Eli Edwards. The poem was reprinted in 1920 in Spring in New Hampshire, a collection of poems by McKay. As far as I am aware, there are no copyright issues associated with the poem. Therefore, it can be reproduced and copied without any copyright infringement.
2. Summary of “The Harlem Dancer”
The first four lines of the poem set the scene. We begin with a vivid description of an audience described as young men hanging out with prostitutes clapping and cheering on a dancer. We learn that not only is she a dancer, but she is a singer as well.
The next four lines (Lines 5–8) go on to describe her movements as resembling a palm that survived a storm. Lines 9–12 further describe the dancer's lovely appearance and the enthusiastic response of a crowd that was absolutely captivated by her performance.
It is only in the last two lines of the sonnet, we notice something that stands out from the rest of the poem. The poet describes the dancer as alienated and not present in “that strange place.’
3. Biographical-historical background
Claude McKay was a poet from Jamaica who moved to the United States in 1912. The poem was written four years after he migrated. Claude McKay is seen as a poet and writer important to the Harlem Renaissance.
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement in Harlem in the 1920s that featured a flourishing of music and poetry among the poets and artists living in the city. The writer's prolific activity as a poet, essayist, and novelist began somewhat earlier than the official start of the Harlem Renaissance. But he is often described as a harbinger of the movement.
The movement was an unapologetic celebration of Black Harlem life and culture, which was not always embraced with approval by certain elements of Black intellectual culture. For example, Claude McKay was famous for his novel Home to Harlem (1928). It gave a peak into the not-so-flattering aspects of Black life in Harlem, such as crime and prostitution.
This met a hostile reaction in W.E.B DuBois, a giant of Black American and general American intellectual life. He famously said:
Home to Harlem for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.
We see a glimpse of McKay’s commitment to portraying the ugly underside of the lives being led by working-class Black people in Harlem in the poem. A poem mentioning young men hanging out with prostitutes would not be conventional at the time and would be seen as risque by any standard.
Another aspect of Claude McKay’s style worth noting is his blend of classical European forms with Black vernacular or subject matter. Back in Jamaica, with the encouragement of Walter Jekyll, he wrote poetry in Jamaican dialect and traditional rhyme and meter. He was able to accomplish this after studying classic English writers such as John Milton.
He was also a Garveyite and believed very much in Black liberation nationalism. This peculiar blend of English classical form and Black pride resulted in works that simultaneously paid homage to his Black heritage while being universal. A good example of this is his famous poem “If We Must Die” (1919):
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
It was even said that Sir Winston Churchill recited the poem in one of his famous and numerous speeches during World War II. This is likely false; however, such a legend is a testament to the universality of the poem. Despite being written as a protest against Black oppression, it reads like something that a war leader during one of the two major wars in the history of the Western world would be inspired by.
4. Themes in "The Harlem Dancer"
The main theme in the poem is alienation. The poet sees in the Harlem Dancer his own alienated self. This would not be the only time that McKay would identify with the downtrodden and out of place. In another poem called “Harlem Shadows” (1922), he is much more explicit in his identification. He is writing about the sad fate of prostitutes in Harlem:
Through the long night until the silver break
Of day the little gray feet know no rest;
Through the lone night until the last snow-flake
Has dropped from heaven upon the earth's white breast,
The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet
Are trudging, thinly shod, from street to street.
Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way
Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace,
Has pushed the timid little feet of clay,
The sacred brown feet of my fallen race!
Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet
In Harlem wandering from street to street.
The last two lines of this poem is a couplet that is more obvious in the way it gives away the poet's identification with these alienated and downtrodden women when compared to the last two lines in "The Harlem Dancer." Claude McKay saw himself as a vagabond at heart through no choice of his own. He was a Black artist and writer who did not feel welcome in Jamaica — a British colony at the time with a White elite who discriminated against the growing educated Black class in Jamaica. Neither did he feel at home in the United States, where African Americans were also faced with oppression.
In addition to the theme of alienation, we see his empathy. McKay is able to identify with a woman who feels out of place and out of touch with herself working as a professional dancer in a bar.
The dancer is not simply a symbol or metaphor that McKay is using to project his own alienation. Instead, we see a skillful and touching depiction of a woman being made to bury her “self” to entertain others and doing so with style, dignity, and grace.
5. Rhetorical analysis
A rhetorical analysis of the poem would first begin with its form. The poem is a traditional Shakespearean sonnet. The tension between its subject matter and style is worth mentioning. McKay follows all the hallmarks of a traditional Shakespearean sonnet. This includes:
Iambic pentameter
The abab cdcd efef gg rhyming scheme
The turn at the end
However, the subject matter and setting would have seemed completely out of touch with classical forms of poetry. This was the United States after Walt Whitman after all — Whitman who ushered in free verse poetry and city life, settings, and living as themes.
However, the style works quite well. The elegant form of the poem with regular rhyme and meter and delicious assonance matches the dancer’s grace and calm. In terms of rhetorical devices, the poem is rich in subtle personal allusion. For example, let's look at Lines 2-4:
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.
This likely describes a scene from the Jamaican countryside where Claude McKay grew up. His allusions to his past life in Jamaica, which he misses become more obvious in Lines 7–8:
To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.
This would be reference to Jamaica’s landscape and climate. The storms in question would be hurricanes, which Jamaica experiences almost every year. Besides allusion, the poem is rich with sound-based rhetorical devices, such as alliteration and assonance.
The first line alone does something remarkable. The assonance or repetition of vowel sounds alongside consonance (the repetition of consonant sounds) almost imitates what is being described—thunderous applause at a bar or nightclub:
Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes
Also “blended flutes / blown by black players” (Lines 3–4) is also a good example of alliteration, as well as “bold-eyed boys.”
Another rhetorical or literary device featured in the poem is symbolism. It is quite subtle, but the poet by comparing the dancer to hallmarks from his native land is making us know that he identifies with the alienation reflected in the face of the dancer. In short, the dancer by the end of the poem symbolizes his own homesickness and deracination.
The table below provides a list of literary devices found in "The Harlem Dancer."
Literary Devices | Definition | Examples |
Alliteration | Repetition of initial consonant words | bold-eyed boys (Line 11); Blown by black players (Line 5) |
Simile | Comparing one thing to the other using like or as | Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes (Line 3); she seemed a proudly swaying palm (Line 7). |
Metaphor | A figure of speech making a direct comparison between two things that are not usually compared with each other | The wine-flushed bold-eyed boys . . ./ Devoured her shape. . (Lines 11-12) |
Anastrophe | The inversion of the usual order of words or phrases | To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm / Grown lovelier for passing through a storm (Lines 8-9) |
Assonance | The repetition of closely placed vowel sounds | She sang and danced . . . (Line 5) |
Symbolism | An object being used to represent an idea or concept | To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm / Grown lovelier for passing through a storm. (Lines 7-8) |
I should point out that one aspect of the symbolism is often missed by most analyses of the poem online. Symbolism exists on two levels in the poem. The poet compares the dancer to a "proudly-swaying palm." This, at first glance, appears to be an unusual comparison to make.
But as mentioned earlier, the poet is from Jamaica, and this is an image from his homeland. The symbol begins first as a simile, which highlights the dancer's grace, strength, and resilience. However, when we consider the connection with the poem's homeland, we have a layered kind of symbolism.
The dancer can be seen as a symbol who reflects the inner turmoils of the poet. He is a Black poet from Jamaica, who feels like an outcast in the racist cultural landscape of the United States. This alienates. This type of alienation is not simply restricted to the United States. McKay also complained about White racism and disrespect after moving from the countryside in Jamaica to the capital city of Kingston.
According to the Poetry Foundation:
At age 17, McKay departed from Sunny Ville to apprentice as a woodworker in Brown’s Town. But he studied there only briefly before leaving to work as a constable in the Jamaican capital, Kingston. In Kingston he experienced and encountered extensive racism. His native Sunny Ville was predominantly Black, but in substantially white Kingston, Black people were considered inferior and capable of only menial tasks. McKay quickly grew disgusted with the city’s bigoted society, and within one year he returned home to Sunny Ville.
The alienated figure of the dance represented the existential out-of-placeness that McKay may have felt as a Black author and artist in the world. We can say that the symbolism of the "proudly-swaying palm" hints at the greater symbolism, which is the dancer herself.
The dancer is putting on a performance that she is not into. She has respect for her job and audience and puts on a grand and classy performance. But she would rather be doing something else and somewhere else. "The Harlem Dancer" in this way perfectly sums up the lack of respect and appreciation that many Black authors and artists felt that their works suffered from.
This can be seen in the reception of McKay's work. He received much popular praise for his novel Home to Harlem, which was published in 1928. It was a novel that featured the seedy underside of Harlem, such as prostitution. White audiences loved the novel. In fact, it has been described as the first successfully commercial novel by a Black author.
However, later novels such as Banana Bottom, which was published in 1933 and set in Jamaica, and which was more artistically accomplished, went relatively ignored. This has some similarity with the dancer featured in the poem. It suggests a Black artist being appreciated for only specific aspects of himself, while other aspects that don't serve the world view of White society being ignored.
6. Perspective and empathy
The poem is well-crafted and subtle. McKay does two things quite well:
His manipulation of perspective
His sympathetic and complete portrayal of the dancer
In terms of perspective, the poem begins with the audience gawking at the happy performance that she is putting on for them. Then by Line 3, it shifts to the poet’s own perspective who can see things that the others can’t — namely her resemblance to him or his situation. Lines 11–12 bring us back to the audience gawking before the final couplet gives us the reveal from the poet’s perspective:
But looking at her falsely-smiling face,
I knew her self was not in that strange place.
The dancer featured in the poem is not simply reduced to a symbol or metaphor for the poet’s own loneliness and alienation from the world around him. She is treated as a person or subject worthy of careful study, respect, sympathy, dignity, and admiration. The poet adds only a few light touches to turn into a reflection of his own heart sickness.
A person unaware of the biography of McKay or who did not know that he was Jamaican would never think that he was writing about anything else than a beautiful, mysterious, and sad young lady dancing with dignity in “that strange place.”
A fusion of Black pride and classical forms of poetry
The Harlem Dancer, as I mentioned earlier, is a peculiar poem. It takes the form of a Shakespearean sonnet to describe a scene that one does not associate with the sonnet. Harlem Renaissance poets and a generation of Black poets before them were often quite fond of using classical metrical forms in their poetry.
This runs the risk of the verse coming across as old-fashioned and stilted. However, Claude McKay hardly suffers from that problem. Despite the rigid metrical classical patterns used in his poem, it always comes across as natural and even modern. A good example is the sonnet"If we must die," which I mentioned earlier.
It perfectly captures the rage of Black injustice and the dignity of fighting back. It even goes further than that. It can be interpreted as a universal anthem against oppression and fighting for human rights and dignity. So much so, that the recital of the poem was wrongly attributed to Winston Churchill during World War II while England was under attack by Nazi Germany.
The same is true for "The Harlem Dancer." The poem is written in perfect Shakespearean sonnet form, while coming across as natural and effortless. This is counterintuitive. When we think of a sonnet, we think of a love poem and perhaps a natural setting.
However, the poem takes place in a club featuring drunken men and "young prostitutes." This creates a kind of creative tension between poetic form and theme. We don't expect a sonnet to takes place in a night club, so we are pleasantly surprised by how well it works. The poet also works in harmony with the regular rhyme and rhythm of the stanza form to make the phrasing and expression in the poem come across as natural.
This does not always work with Harlem Renaissance poets. Let's take the example of Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson. Her poem "Sonnet" can be described as a successful poem. But it's a rare success. Alot of her poetry, in my opinion, suffered from an over-reliance on too-rigid metrical forms. This can be seen in "The Idler." The first stanza is produced here:
An idle lingerer on the wayside's road,
He gathers up his work and yawns away;
A little longer, ere the tiresome load
Shall be reduced to ashes or to clay.
The poem has too many old-fashioned and awkward-sounding expressions such as "ere" or "wayside's road." McKay's poem doesn't suffer from any of this. This could be for a variety of reasons. McKay, before he left Jamaica, published a number of poems in Jamaican dialect using regular verse forms. Here is an example of one stanza from "The Apple-Woman's Complaint":
WHILE me deh walk 'long in de street,
Policeman's yawnin' on his beat ;
An' dis de wud him chief ta'n say--
Me mus'n' car' me apple-tray.
The poem faithfully produces Jamaican dialect while using regular meter and rhyme. It features a woman who sells apples and other fruits from a cart being harassed by a constable. McKay's approach to poetry was heavily influenced by Walter Jekyll, an Englishman in Jamaica who introduced him to greats like John Milton and Alexander Pope. In addition, Jekyll also encouraged him to express himself in Jamaican dialect.
This provided him with a unique opportunity. Jamaican dialect is not a natural form for classical verse forms. This means he would have needed much practice of his craft to produce such poems. Writing in Jamaican dialect gave him sufficient practice writing in non-standard English while relying on classical verse forms. This means writing a sonnet in "standard English" would be conceivably easier for him, allowing him to express himself without coming across as stilted or unnatural.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2024, November 06). The Harlem Dancer | Poem Summary and Analysis. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/the-harlem-dancer-poem-summary-and-analysis |
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