‘New York’ is a poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor that seeks to illustrate a sprawling portrait of all that is wondrous and fallible with the city. It also serves as a celebration of the Harlem Renaissance and its writers, individuals that extended the mythology of the city to include Black voices and signaled the essential benefits of such a plurality within the metropolis.
The poem echoes those values alongside Senghor’s advocacy for the Négritude movement. The goal as expressed in the poem is to simultaneously uplift and recognize the independent achievements and value of Black communities, while also championing a melding of race and culture as a means of renewing New York to former glory.
Summary
‘New York’ by Léopold Sédar Senghor urges the personified city to accept its Black communities as a vibrant and transformative piece of itself.
‘New York’ opens with a sprawling description of the city by the speaker, one that is defined by both their adoration and vexation. In the first stanza, the cityscape is heavily personified as a shy woman, but as the poem continues, this timidness is revealed to simply hide its gloomier side. A variety of imagery and figurative language follows that accentuates New York’s cold lifelessness and lack of humanity. The second stanza offers a possible solution to such a void of the soul: Harlem.
Here Senghor offers vibrant imagery to counter the barren inhospitality of the city that’s characterized by scenes of Black music, art, and life. It’s a celebration of the night that urges the residents of Harlem to remember the awe of the Harlem Renaissance and their silently endured strife. The last stanza ends with the speaker melding together the majesty of New York and its mythic status with their advocation for Black culture to be absorbed into it.
Structure and Form
‘New York’ is composed of three stanzas of varying lengths. There is no definite rhyme scheme or meter as the poem is written in free verse. But it still wields a cadence created by Senghor’s exclamatory verse and passionate voice that ebbs and flows throughout.
Literary Devices
‘New York’ uses a sprawling variety of imagery and figurative language to convey the multitudes of emotions expressed in Senghor’s poem. There is personification: “Those huge, long-legged, golden girls. / So shy, at first, before your blue metallic eyes and icy smile,” (2-3); metaphor: “my owl eyes” (5) “Only artificial hearts paid for in cold cash” (18), “And I proclaim Night more truthful than the day” (33); and simile: “And murky streams carry away hygenic loving / Like rivers overflowing with the corpses of babies.” (23-24).
There are also examples of visual imagery: “eclipse of the sun” (5), “Your light is sulphurous against the pale towers” (6); tactile imagery: “his hand in my cool hand” (15); kinesthetic imagery: “Hips rippling like silk and spearhead breasts” (40); and auditory imagery: “Listen, New York! O listen to your bass male voice, / Your vibrant oboe voice, the muted anguish of your tears” (48-49).
Detailed Analysis
Stanza One
I
New York! At first I was bewildered by your beauty,
Those huge, long-legged, golden girls.
(…)
In the first stanza of ‘New York,‘ the speaker personifies the city as a means of illustrating all its diversity and complexity, especially in regard to their own changing perceptions and relationship with it. The opening lines describe how the speaker was “at first bewildered” (1) by the city’s beauty, personifying its skyscrapers as “long-legged, golden girls” (2) and having “blue metallic eyes and [an] icy smile” (3).
But the speaker doesn’t stay perfectly enamored with the city, and New York’s coyness eventually reveals bleaker realities hidden with its gleaming skyline. Beyond the edge of its “skyscraper streets” (4), one finds despair, and the sun sits eclipsed behind the tall structures themselves. The speaker confesses that all it takes is “two weeks on naked sidewalks of Manhattan” (10) for the sheen to wear off and a fever to set in.
A cold lifelessness settles in — one that causes the birds to “fall suddenly dead under the high, sooty terraces” (14). A catalog of further images develops this motif of the city as cold and emotionless: “No laugh from a growing child, his hand in my cool hand” (15); “No tender word, and no lips, / Only artificial hearts paid for in cold cash” (17-18).
There is even a reference to the city’s polluting industrialism with the description of the city’s hazy light as “sulphurous against the pale towers” (6). As well as the stunning image conjured up by the stanza’s ending simile: “murky streams carry away hygienic loving / Like rivers overflowing with the corpses of babies” (23-24).
Stanza Two
II
Now is the time of signs and reckoning, New York!
Now is the time of manna and hyssop.
(…)
The second stanza of ‘New York’ seeks to contrast the unfeeling mood and spirit of the city that was established in the first stanza. The speaker presents the solution to the metropolitan woes — Harlem, or more specifically, a reaffirmation of the Harlem Renaissance. There are biblical allusions as well to “manna and hyssop” (26), the former being the miraculous sustenance provided by God to the Israelites in Exodus. The effect is to ignite action amongst Black and white New Yorkers alike.
The speaker seeks to reinvigorate the Black voices of Harlem, which they see as “teeming with sounds and ritual colors / And outrageous smells” (29-30). It is a place of activity that appears starkly antithetical to the cold skyscrapers of the city’s center. The speaker starts to advocate for blackness or darkness as more appealing than its opposite: “And I proclaim Night more truthful than the day” (33). For it is then that the “festival of Night” (32) begins, heralding an overflow of emotion and vivaciously ardent life: “Ballets of water lilies and fabulous masks / And mangoes of love” (41-42).
There’s even a bit of ethereal mysticism summoned up in the sky where “angels’ wings and sorcerers’ plumes” (47). But despite all this revelry and beauty, the speaker ends the stanza with a forewarning to listen to both its own strong voices — “your bass male voice, / Your vibrant oboe voice” (48-49) — but also its long suffered pain. This is manifested in another striking piece of imagery: “the muted anguish of your tears / Falling in great clots of blood” (49-50).
Stanza Three
III
(…)
And your eyes, especially your ears, to God
Who in one burst of saxophone laughter
Created heaven and earth in six days,
And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.
The third stanza of ‘New York’ ends with a powerful plea to the city to accept all that its Black communities and people have to offer. “New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood” (53), they shout. The fluidity of the metaphor lending itself to the way the black blood becomes an “oil of life” (54). Washing away rust from steel joints, allowing its bridges to attain “the curve of hips and supple vines” (55). As life returns so does the city’s spirit and own mythic wonder — there is “no need to invent the Sirens” (60) or any other myths. The speaker describes being able to now hear God and their “burst of saxophone laughter” (63) that created both heaven and earth before taking the seventh day to sleep a “deep Negro sleep” (65).
FAQs
The poem’s theme lies in the speaker’s belief that reunifying New Yorkers — Black and white — is the only way to restore it and remedy what ails it. Stricken by a cold indifference that’s rooted in its complicity with racism, Senghor urges its citizens to absorb the life-giving Black blood of its people as a means of rejuvenation through reconciliation.
Senghor was a part of the anti-colonial Négritude movement, which sought to create bridges among the African diaspora as a means of unification for Black communities. This poem expresses a number of the poet’s beliefs regarding the movement, including an urgent desire to foster Black independence and self-reliance but also not shying away from a melding of culture — an idea central to New York’s “melting pot” status.
Throughout the poem, the speaker invokes often God or uses biblically charged imagery and figurative language. The most striking of which is the poem’s final lines, which project elements of Black culture and personas onto the deity. The effect is similar to when the speaker starts characterizing aspects of the city (such as its bridges) as being made more lively thanks to the Black blood that oils them. Senghor does this to further blur the line between typically Eurocentric and white spaces — from skyscrapers to myths and even the tale of Genesis — and those occupied by people of color.
Similar Poems
- ‘Let America Be America Again’ by Langston Hughes – this poem is a powerful expression of the American Dream and its attainability.
- ‘A Brief History of Hostility’ by Jamaal May – this poem details an account of historical violence that hones in on slavery and oppression.
- ‘Harlem Shadows’ by Claude McKay – this poem takes an intense look at the lives of Black sex workers in Harlem.
