Claude McCkay’s poem The Tropics in New York uses the sonnet form to tell the feelings of nostalgia the speaker has for what he feels is normality, a feeling of home. McKay was born in Jamaica and lived there until his early twenties. Mckay can probably be seen as the speaker in this poem and it most probably tells of McKay’s experience of homesickness.
The first stanza of the sonnet has a light tone that is describing the tropical fruits in a market, presumably, because of the title, in New York. These fruits, “Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root / Cocoa in pods and alligator pear, / and tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,” are neutral and colorful images that almost produce a sense of longing in the form tantalizing fruits (ll. 1-3).
The second stanza visits the memories of the speaker which take the reader to a land with “fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills, / And dewy dawns, mystical blue skies” (ll. 6-8). The perfect sonnet form breaks here with the fifth and seventh lines not rhyming. Whether a comment on difference between the place the speaker is discussing and where he is now is up for debate.
The third stanza, true to its sonnet form, shifts in tone from one of slight longing and nostalgia to one of complete homesickness and then sorrow. The last stanza follows:
My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;
A wave of longing though my body swept,
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
I turned aside and bowed my head and wept. (ll. 11-14)
The speaker is now announcing his longing for something or someplace openly. Using the word hungry stays true to the previous fruit imagery in the first stanza and the reader feels the speakers homesickness and by the last line sorrow at his feelings of being an outsider in the new society, which is New York. I believe this poem would resonate with the feelings of many immigrants forced or not to leave their home countries, even if in pursuit of a better life. Claude McKay does an excellent job of presenting this to the reader and his shift from positive imagery to negative emotions is very effective.
The Tropics in New York can be found on page 502 of our Anthology.
As far as the form is concerned, this is just a poem composed of three quatrains rhyming ABAB, and “skies” and “memories” are close enough in rhyme to work, I think. That said, there is a shift after the first 8 lines that does resemble the sonnet. After that formal clarification, I think you do a good job of capturing this as a poem of displacement, of longing for home.