"I will confess / I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!"
This clause comes at the end of the first sentence (and first quatrain), establishing for the first time that the speaker loves America despite "her" violence and oppression. While the word "confess" suggests some reluctance to admit his love, the exclamation that ends the sentence suggests strong emotions, and it is indeed the tensions and ambivalence in the speaker's relationship that make his feelings for America so strong. On the one hand, the "cultured" in "cultured hell" confirms America's achievements, anticipating the "wonders" and "priceless treasures" at the end of the poem and countering any Eliotic notion of modernity as a cultural wasteland. Yet the "hell" also unambiguously acknowledges that America can be a place of extreme suffering and misery, especially for the disenfrachised.
"Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state, / I stand within her walls with not a shred / Of terror"
This transition into the poem's second half introduces the poem's first explicitly political language: the speaker compares himself to "a rebel" before "a king in state." The loaded word "king" implicitly comments on the hypocrisy of American "democracy," and McKay, who wrote eloquently and often on the need for resistance, here acknowledges his own status as a "rebel" within the "walls" of both America and the sonnet form. However, this resistance is also immediately tempered by the speaker's assertion that—rather surprisingly for a rebel—he feels neither "terror" nor "malice" in the face of his antagonist, creating a sense of ambivalence and contradiction that is characteristic of the poem as a whole.
"Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand / Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand."
This final couplet closes the poem with a dark and foreboding vision of America's future decline. The reference to the proper noun "Time" here implies a vast, all-encompassing perspective, placing America in the long succession of empires that have risen and fallen throughout the ages. On the one hand, "unerring" indicates that this fall will not be a mistake, and the poem has previously spoken of the internal failures and contradictions that will bring about America's downfall. On the other hand, though, McKay's reference to "priceless treasures" demonstrates that something important will be lost when America finally meets its demise. The sibilance in the final line ("priceless treasures sinking in the sand") gives us a sense of slowly slipping away rather than chaotic apocalyptic destruction, and the poem importantly ends on a complex note of ambivalence for the loss of this great and terrible nation.
