Explore the poem

McKay’s neatly rhymed eighteen‑line poem expresses his characteristic sympathy for people exploited, marginalised and condemned by society. In this instance he writes with great gentleness and pity about the plight of female prostitutes.

How does the poet inspire sympathy for these women? Look at how they are described as being like children. The adjective ‘little’ is repeated in each stanza. Repetition of the phrase ‘street to street’ at the end of each stanza conveys the idea that the women are trapped in this life. Notice how they also seem reluctant to do this degrading work; their footsteps are ‘halting’, their feet ‘timid’. They are vulnerable, alone and ‘weary, weary’, an adjective that suggests physical tiredness but also tiredness with their lives. Most importantly, McKay states that the women have been forced into their degradation by social traumas, such as ‘poverty’.

McKay employs synecdoche: the women’s tired feet stand in for their exploitation. In turn, the women represent the whole ‘fallen (black) race’. Finally, in its turn, the black race here represents all minorities exploited and degraded by a ‘harsh world’.

About Claude McKay

Born in Jamaica, Claude McKay left home in 1912 and, at the age of twenty‑one, arrived in America. In the USA he was shocked by the virulent racism and the bitter reality of segregation. In response, he wrote defiant protest poems and actively supported black working‑class movements.

McKay travelled to Russia and England in the early 1920s, before publishing an award-winning novel, Home to Harlem, the first commercially successful novel by a black writer, and over time he became a strong influence on the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural and artistic movement in the 1920s and ’30s that promoted black consciousness.

A journalist, novelist, short‑story writer, political idealist, convert to Roman Catholicism and, of course, poet, McKay dedicated his life to art, using his writing as a way of fighting against bigotry and the racist stereotyping of black people. In 2002 he was included on a list of a Hundred Great African‑Americans.

Read more about Claude McKay in the
American National Biography