To One Coming North

Written as four rhyming quatrains, or four-line stanzas, with an ABAB rhyme scheme, the reader can experience the poem as an elaborate allegory or metaphor for migration, whether it is the poet’s own journey from Jamaica to the United States or the Great Migration of Black people from the American south to the cities of the American north and west. The diction of the poem is formal and flowery, and its rhymes are easy. The imagery is pastoral, drawing on the ballad tradition of English poets like Robert Burns. However, what gives the poem its peculiar power is the fact that the romantic imagery expresses a social reality and a strong message of hope for people navigating the complex experience of displacement from lands they have come to regard as home. In the context of the poem, the south refers to both the geographical orientation of the tropical paradise of Jamaica the poet has left behind, as well as the region of the American south. Just like the American south, which is beautiful yet dangerous, the poet’s Caribbean homeland too is a symbol of the speaker’s memory and sense of nostalgia, as well as the complex experience of racial discrimination and violence.

The movement of the poem is acutely sensitive to the feelings of recent immigrants. The opening words, “[a]t first” (Line 1), suggest that these feelings are layered and shifting. Though the immigrants arriving north will feel the euphoria that accompanies travel and a great change, at first, subsequently they will become homesick. The poet deliberately places the immigrants to the northern cities in winter; a snowy landscape would be wondrous to those used to sunnier, balmier weather. Had the poem’s setting been spring or summer, the metaphor of unfamiliar seasons would have lost its weight. Here, snow becomes a metaphor for both the joy and the fear of the recent immigrants. The speaker described the snow first as “playful” (Line 1), comparing it to the “white moths” (Line 2) of the south and to glittering “waters of the hills” (Line 3). This comparison highlights the first impressions of the migrants as they delight in the joy of their freedom and the prospect of building a new future from scratch. The feeling of the immigrants mirror the experience of Black people during the Great Migration, as well as other migrants in other places and times.

In the second stanza, the euphoric mood of the opening begins to change as the immigrants begin to build a new life and the practical realities of dealing with snow too become clear. In reality, snow often seems magical, at first, and then excitement gives way to the mundane and disheartening task of clearing the snow. Over the course of several days of overcast winter skies, spirits may begin to falter. For a southerner accustomed to warmer weather and brighter days, this reality would appear even more hard-hitting. For the migrant, the realization that no perfect, promised land awaits may also be difficult. The speaker captures this feeling of anti-climax and despair through changing imagery: the snow, at first playful or wondrous, covers the landscape. The air is no longer magical, but a “wind-worried void” (Line 6) where only “a spell of heat and light” (Line 7) can penetrate and thaw. Heat and light, symbols of home and warmth, are fleeting and illusory, and, at the start of the third stanza, the speaker predicts that the immigrants they address will begin to long for the lands they left behind.

In the third stanza, the speaker’s tone becomes more intimate, as the speaker reveals their own experiences with a move to colder climes. Opening the stanza with the phrase “like me” (Line 9), the speaker reveals that they too are a migrant. Thus, they can relate to the experience of their audience, which lends the speaker’s utterances more authority and underscores the hope of their message: If the speaker has navigated their migration successfully, so can the audience. The speaker too has longed for the sunny weather of their homeland, which they describe, as the imagery shifts from the chilly landscape of stanzas one and two to the warm, inviting world of the south, with its “flowering lanes and leas and spaces dry” (Line 10). The juxtaposition of imagery mimics the strong current of nostalgia immigrants feel for the world left behind, one that grows stronger the longer they are away. The left-behind lands are identified with “feelings fine and strong” (Line 11) and an open “vivid silver-fleck’d blue sky” (Line 12).

Yet the final stanza of the poem establishes that the comforts of home are deceptive. By using the word “changeless” in Line 13, the speaker tugs the immigrant and their own self to the reality of the situation and the reasons behind the migration north. The world of the south – whether the American south, the “southern isles” (Line 13) or Jamaica from which the poet immigrated – is beautiful in the springtime, but in this context, is mired in the past and unchanging. The south cannot afford the migrants the possibility of change and betterment, which is why they decided to go north in the first place. The word “changeless” (Line 13) undercuts the lulling nostalgia of the past, and the world of the south seems static and frozen in time. The imagery turns north again, as the spring sheds “her charm” (Line 14) upon the world, and the north’s changing seasons become a metaphor for opportunity and hope. The north’s potential for change is the reason why the migrants will grow to love “the Northland wreathed in golden smiles” (Line 15). The northern sun is “glad and warm” (Line 16), and the speaker ends the poem with this image to emphasize their message of hope.