Joy in the Woods

Though published more than a century ago, “Joy in the Woods” still speaks to a culture uncertain and uneasy over the rewards of work. The poem’s longevity thus reflects Claude McKay’s understanding of the psychology of work itself. Save for the 1% of any capitalist culture that controls the means of production, work can feel unrewarding. This feeling is a cliché of the post-punk culture, with its hard-core rejection of authority most malignantly represented by the workplace. The feeling is also a reflection of the ever-expanding computer-created digital work environment in which conventional boundaries between work and home have been all but lost.

The sentiment that work is unrewarding for many doesn't derive from a simple explanation; rather, work "sucks" because it sucks the life out of workers. The poem reveals that the damage done by any culture’s commitment to enslaving much of its population to unrewarding work goes soul deep. Within that oppressive culture, any memories of the world of nature become increasingly nostalgic, increasingly ironic as one by one we each surrender to a work world that first strips us of our humanity, then burdens us with onerous and repetitive tasks, and in the end wears down our anger and our anxieties and deconstructs us each into slick, unfeeling but useful man-machines. It is not so much an anti-life as an un-life.

McKay's poem also addresses the cost of such widespread surrender. The poem alternates between the speaker’s hard-eyed description of the limits of the urban world with its commitment to industrial production at all costs and the speaker’s romantic sense of the world beyond that closed and narrow environment. The evocation of that natural world—with its scented blossoms, its happy birds, its “heartening, summer showers” (Line 23), its “smiling” shrubs and bushes in bloom (Line 24)—may or may not be McKay’s own recollections of his childhood home in the lush tropical world of Jamaica. It does not matter in the end. Indeed, the poem suggests that the stunning natural world conjured by the poet exists only in his imagination. It is so perfect, so idyllic that the world he imagines is less a memory of any specific time and place as it is his escape, his desperate strategy for consoling his flagging spirits. It is not difficult to see the poem as the thoughts of a worker heading off to an office or a factory, the world that is killing him, wearing his “ugly clothes” and his “bad shoes” (Lines 13, 14), and dreaming of trees alive with birdsong and incensed by flowers in a perpetual summer.

What the poem emphasizes is that the speaker has no choice but to spend his days at work. He is forced to go on because of his fears of the alternative, the anxiety over not being able to meet his responsibilities. Capitalism creates a crushing cycle of self-sustaining logic: I work because I must eat. Capitalism ensures that its most committed workers realize they are little more than low-level drones, or to borrow from the language of the poem, slaves and man-machines, too timid to complain, too proud to die by suicide.

The poem ends quietly, in low-key discouragement. That is striking. It is the business of polemics to deal in hope. Poems such as McKay’s are contentious and uncompromising writings designed to enrage by indicting current conditions. In doing so, these poems seek to push forward an agenda of genuine social, political, and economic change. This should be the song of an angry people who refuse servitude. This should be a song of tomorrow. Such writing has little time or interest for that matter to dwell on the negativity of hopelessness. Workers of the world unite, such as Marxist poetry traditionally demands as it confidently soars into the inspirational rhetoric of possibility. It is poetry that welcomes, even demands, exclamation points. Here, the exclamation points are ironic, underscoring the speaker’s awareness of himself as a drudge (Line 16), a victim, too much of a man to weep, too little of a man to sacrifice himself in protest.

In short, McKay seems unavailable to optimism. The pseudonym under which McKay published the poem initially—Hugh Hope—grows increasingly ironic in the poem itself. All I’ve got, the poem says, is hope uncomplicated by reality. Although the composition of the poem lines up with McKay’s time in London when he was most emphatically committed to radical social activism and used his writings to further what he hoped would blossom into an international workers revolution, “Joy in the Woods” offers little optimism. In the end, for all his musings about the world of the land bursting with life, the speaker is left enslaved, more dead than alive. McKay offers a bleak assessment of the workers’ dilemma. The poem closes without the incendiary call to arms that often defined the poetry of McKay’s time, poetry that pushed the agenda for a workers’ revolution. The “man-machine toil-tired” (Line 29) craves the beauty he knows is not his to enjoy. Because he must work, all he will ever know of beauty is how to live without it.