Claude McKay

Claude McKay (September 15, 1889 – May 22, 1948) was a Jamaican writer and communist and part of the Harlem Renaissance.

Sourced

• The shivering birds beneath the eaves
  Have sheltered for the night.
  • After the Winter, l. 3-4

• The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
  A chafing savage, down the decent street;
  And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
  Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.
  • The White House, l. 5-8

• Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate
  Against the potent poison of your hate.
  • The White House, l. 13-14

• 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!
  • If We Must Die, l. 5-8

• Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
  And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
  Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
  I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
  • America, l. 1-4

• The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
  Devoured her with their eager, passionate gaze;
  But looking at her falsely-smiling face,
  I knew her self was not in that strange place.
  • The Harlem Dancer, l. 11-14

• Deep in the secret chambers of my heart
  I muse my life-long hate, and without flinch
  I bear it nobly as I live my part.
  • The White City, l. 2-4

• I have forgotten much, but still remember
  The poinsiana's red, blood-red in warm December.
  • Flame-Heart, l. 9-10

• Oh some I know! I have embalmed the days,
  Even the sacred moments when we played,
  All innocent of passion, uncorrupt,
  At noon and evening in the flame-heart’s shade.
  • Flame-Heart, l. 26-29

• Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
  Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
  • If We Must Die, l. 13-14

• And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
  I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.
  • The Tropics in New York, l. 11-12

Unsourced

• I know the dark delight of being strange,
  The penalty of difference in the crowd,
  The loneliness of wisdom among fools.

• Idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based on a solid foundation of social and political realism.

• If a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything.

• Nations, like plants and human beings, grow. And if the development is thwarted they are dwarfed and overshadowed.

• Upon the clothes behind the tenement, That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines, Linking each flat, but to each indifferent, Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.