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.