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The Harlem Dancer | Poem Summary and Analysis

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.

Three women in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance in 1929.
Three women in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance in 1929.

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.


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


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 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. 


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.” 

 

Cite this EminentEdit article

Antoine, M. (2024, November 06). The Harlem Dancer | Poem Summary and Analysis. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/the-harlem-dancer-poem-summary-and-analysis









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