My Mother

Reg wished me to go with him to the field,
I paused because I did not want to go;
But in her quiet way she made me yield
Reluctantly, for she was breathing low.
Her hand she slowly lifted from her lap
And, smiling sadly in the old sweet way,
She pointed to the nail where hung my cap.
Her eyes said: I shall last another day.
But scarcely had we reached the distant place,
When o’er the hills we heard a faint bell ringing;
A boy came running up with frightened face;
We knew the fatal news that he was bringing.
I heard him listlessly, without a moan,
Although the only one I loved was gone.

II

The dawn departs, the morning is begun,
The trades come whispering from off the seas,
The fields of corn are golden in the sun,
The dark-brown tassels fluttering in the breeze;
The bell is sounding and the children pass,
Frog-leaping, skipping, shouting, laughing shrill,
Down the red road, over the pasture-grass,
Up to the school-house crumbling on the hill.
The older folk are at their peaceful toil,
Some pulling up the weeds, some plucking corn,
And others breaking up the sun-baked soil.
Float, faintly-scented breeze, at early morn
Over the earth where mortals sow and reap –
Beneath its breast my mother lies asleep.

This pair of sonnets, My Mother, by the Jamaican-born poet and novelist Claude McKay (1889-1948) was first published in the Liberator in March 1920, and revised later for his collection Harlem Shadows (1922).

The biography here explains that McKay had won a trade scholarship to study in Kingston in 1907, but that a violent earthquake had demolished the trade school, and he had returned to his village, Sunny Ville in Upper Clarendon Parish. His mother died less than six months later. Claude was one of 11 children born to Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, and one of eight to survive. Hannah had always been especially receptive to his artistic and intellectual ambitions.

The writing in the two sonnets has a calm clarity that seems to suggest a certain distance in time from its sad subject, but ready access to some finely etched detail. In the first, the detail often concerns body language. The narrative is intrinsically dramatic but McKay delivers it without rhetorical emphasis, through observation, pitched at a sometimes conversational level. Someone, “Reg”– perhaps one of the writer’s elder brothers – has urged him to accompany him “to the field”. He is reluctant to leave his mother but the intuitive understanding between them allows him to read in her eyes “I shall last another day”. So he accepts the permission she grants: “Her hand she slowly lifted from her lap, / And, smiling sadly in the old sweet way, / She pointed to the nail where hung my cap.” Perhaps it’s a final act of kindness; she has foreseen the closeness of her death and wants to spare her son its direct witness.

The news reaches the two young men first in the form of “a faint bell ringing”. The bell suggests a call for aid may have been sounded: a bell would reach farther around the village than a human shout. Wordless communication continues predominant, and there’s a sharp contrast between the misreading of the mother’s eyes and their promised extra day of life, and the instant understanding of what’s written on the young messenger’s “frightened face”. The emphasis on wordlessness continues, this time the speaker’s own. The last couplet reveals his un-surprise : “I heard him listlessly, without a moan …” McKay at the time of writing must have had an exuberant knowledge of his own accomplishments in language. But this sonnet is a revelation of the bare spaces in consciousness and communication where language can be annihilated. Communication may take place at an instinctive level, and it’s not necessarily infallible. It may also occur without words, and “without a moan” – the sound the writer had seemingly expected himself to make in the face of such a significant loss.

In the second sonnet, time has moved on. We know this from the concluding triplet (the couplet now being embedded in a trio of lines), where as before the narrative achieves completion. This time, the image of the mother asleep, like a child, “beneath” the “breast” of the earth, offers a more poetic, perhaps Christian-tinged note of consolation. The sonnet’s concept is partly a traditional one (life and work must continue as before after a death in the community). McKay, however, is occupying larger ground beyond what might appear to be stereotype (“golden corn”, “peaceful toil”). A particular Jamaican landscape where “the trades” (the Trade winds) “come whispering off the seas” is fully present: the “golden corn” itself is reimagined and marked out by its “dark-brown tassels fluttering in the breeze”. The detail of “the school-house crumbling on the hill” is a succinct image of struggle and attainment, a perfectly placed signpost in farming country where the labour is mostly manual and relentless.

It’s in the 11th line, where some of the labourers are “breaking up the sun-baked soil”, that the importance of the cooling breeze becomes apparent. In fact, the unusual concluding triplet is an address to the breeze, a plea with it to refresh the mortals working on the earth, and a suggestion, too, perhaps, that the “sleeping” mother may also somehow know its “faintly-scented” benison.

Not least among McKay’s accomplishments is the enormous range of tone and subject in his sonnets. They may be trenchant political implements or celebrations of ecstatic physical love, some of the latter interpreted now to be homoerotic. Poem of the week has previously visited McKay’s work, and it is a pleasure to review here another facet of his many-sided achievement.