Joy in the Woods

Bad shoes (Line 14) symbolize the claustrophobic prison of capitalism. Claude McKay’s peripatetic life gives credence to the cliché that life is a journey. Born and raised in the Caribbean, McKay moved restlessly throughout his adult life, living for a time in the Deep South, the Midwest, New York, Amsterdam, Brussels, London, and finally in Chicago. That life journey, in turn, created a telling metaphor for McKay’s own spiritual journey, his restless testing of a variety of “isms” in his efforts to advocate for the evolution away from what he saw as the great evil of the human condition—spiritual enslavement.

Given McKay’s embrace of life as full of possibility and evolution, that the speaker in the poem specifically notes his “bad shoes” that “hurt” (Line 14) suggests the speaker’s diminished life is closed off to possibility. Bad shoes symbolize the lack of any viable horizon, even the hope of change. The shoes, the speaker admits, hurt his feet. He is incapable of authentic journeying. The bad shoes are sufficient only to get him to work. The tantalizing possibilities of life settle into the dreary reality of existence as an insignificant cog within the vast, depersonalizing machinery of capitalism.