The version of this poem used to create this study guide appears in: McKay, Claude. “Harlem Shadows.” Poetry Foundation Online. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44693/harlem-shadows.

Note that parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

“Harlem Shadows” is an 18-line poem by Jamaican poet Claude McKay. The speaker hears a woman walking in the Black neighborhood of Harlem at night. Many women, who are implied to be sex-workers, pass by the speaker. The women move constantly and hurriedly through the night until daybreak, and seemingly through all of time, “until the last snow-flake has dropped from heaven upon the earth’s white breast” (10).

The speaker then laments that poverty and the world’s cruelty has forced women into this line work, wandering the streets of Harlem. The register switches into a lament about “my fallen race” (line 16).