POEM OF THE WEEK

If the past year has left you feeling uneasy about taking the Tube – and risking what Claude McKay calls its “sick and heavy air” – you’re in good company. Ever since

Ezra Pound’s haiku-like “In a Station of the Metro” (1913), the Underground has been a popular symbol of poetic malaise.

McKay’s “Subway Wind” might be the best sick-of-thesubway poem there is. First published in the Liberator magazine exactly a century ago, in 1921, it has the feel of a sonnet – complete with the traditional “volta”, a twist around the halfway mark – but with 16 lines, rather than 14. It’s like two extra passengers have squeezed into an already-packed carriage, just before the doors shut.

Read it aloud and relish the glutted music of phrases like

“the city’s great, gaunt gut”.

That “great, gaunt” is a marvellous oxymoron; the city is both stuffed and starved.

Born in Jamaica in 1889,

McKay moved to America to study in 1912, and found it unwelcoming. A feeling of homesickness is at the heart of this poem’s conceit, that the “weary wind” feels just as trapped as the passengers it buffets. It, too, longs for islands and open seas.

This may be a quintessentially American poem, but it’s worth noting that McKay was just as familiar with our Tube. From 1919-21 he lived in London, where he met George Bernard Shaw and worked with Sylvia Pankhurst on her radical newspaper, the Workers’ Dreadnought.

“Subway Wind” was reprinted in McKay’s 1922 collection Harlem Shadows. One of the key books of the Harlem Renaissance – the 1920s flourishing of black music, art and literature – it is available in an excellent online edition at harlemshadows.org. Tristram Fane Saunders