The Tropics in New York

“The Tropics in New York” is a poem that deals in marked contrasts, in climate, locale, and time. The speaker is likely an immigrant to the United States, or at least someone who has been living there for a while. However, apart from the hint in the poem’s title, this is not immediately apparent, as the poem unfolds gradually. Stanza 1 presents a series of images of exotic fruit without explanation. Only in the last line does the speaker hint at what these images call up in his mind. He thinks of “parish fairs” (Line 4), suggesting perhaps that he is familiar with rural life, where such items might be entered in a contest and eligible to win a prize.

Stanza 2, however, changes the mood and imagined setting. Line 1 states, “Set in the window,” and it becomes apparent that the fruit described in the first stanza is a display in a store window. The speaker is walking down a street in New York City (a city that the poet McKay knew well), and the window display catches his attention. The effect is immediate and far-reaching. He is taken back in memory to a place he knew intimately earlier in his life, where such fruits were found in abundance in their natural setting.

It can be presumed that he is thinking of his homeland somewhere in a tropical or semitropical country (likely the Jamaica of McKay’s youth). The images that come to his mind are idealized and contrast the setting in which he now finds himself. Although the season is not given, the New York City street—whatever the weather—must certainly be different from the lost rural paradise that suddenly floods into the speaker’s mind.

Stanza 2 thus presents a vivid contrast between town and country: The actual cityscape in which the speaker lives—one can imagine the hustle and bustle—contrasts with the slower-moving pastoral world of his youth, where life was lived in harmony with nature’s rhythms. The immigrant’s picture of his native land presents images of gentle streams and fruit trees ripe for the picking, rather than a store in New York City that a person must enter and hand over money for the privilege of taking home, say, a few bananas.

The other contrast here is the past versus the present. The speaker is nostalgic for the former and perhaps has not much love for the latter. Indeed, his conjuring of those “mystical blue skies” (Line 7) in the tropical paradise of his youth has a religious quality. The sky pours down a blessing, and the “nun-like hills” (Line 8) receive it with humility and reverence.

Given the immigrant’s sudden involvement in this picture of perfection from the past, in Stanza 3 he can no longer look at the window display. It is too painful for him because he longs for it so much. He is filled with nostalgia for nature and its abundance as well as the time-honored ways people lived back then in rural society, the “old, familiar ways” (Line 11).

The poem thus hints at some of the challenges that an immigrant faces, such as leaving one type of society and culture—and climate—for a different environment many miles away. It seems possible that as an immigrant in New York City, the speaker is living a more isolated life, no longer enjoying the sense of community and shared culture he knew on his island paradise. A communal way of living governed by the predictable passage of the seasons has likely given way to a more atomistic, individualistic lifestyle in a room or an apartment in a restless city that never sleeps. The speaker weeps because of the unbridgeable gap between his present, problematic reality and the idealized, vanished past for which he yearns.