Lines 11-14: "Darkly I gaze" to "sinking in the sand"
Summary
The poem's final section shifts the focus from the speaker's personal relationship with America to his prognostications about America's future. The personal "I" almost immediately disappears as the speaker takes on a cosmic perspective attuned to the workings of "Time" itself, and in an implicit critique of American exceptionalism he predicts that America will fall just like the many great empires before it. In this image of "granite wonders" sinking into the sand, McKay pointedly alludes to the famous sonnet "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, where a traveler reports encountering in the "lone and level sands" the "colossal Wreck" of a ruined statue with the following inscription on its pedestal: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" While McKay's speaker takes pains in these final lines to emphasize America's invaluable "treasures," here America's "might" will not save it from "Time's unerring hand," and the final image of "sand" evokes shifting sands and the sand in an hourglass to suggest changing fortunes and ultimate impermanence.
Analysis
This final section opens with the suggestive "Darkly I gaze," which refers both to the dark and gloomy nature of the speaker's prophecy and also—especially because followed with the personal "I"—to the speaker's own blackness. This self-racializing precisely in his moment of prophecy suggests that the speaker's "outsider" status as a racial minority gives him a particular perspective that allows him to envision America's future, though the phrase is also further complicated by its possible allusion to 1 Corinthians 13:12, "For now we see through a glass, darkly." This famous Biblical verse refers to seeing dimly in a mirror. This allusion suggests that the speaker's prophecy is more of a vague foreboding than a clear vision; in another moment of self-reflexivity, it also parallels the poem's own "mirrored" (4, 3, 3, 4) structure. These complex references to the Bible and to Shelley's "Ozymandias, King of Kings"—the latter of which McKay had already begun to set up with line 7's "king"—paint the speaker as subtle and cultured, inviting comparison to McKay himself, though we should not collapse the two.
As critic Gary Edward Holcomb points out, this final image of America's demise is also much different from that of McKay's modernist contemporaries like T.S. Eliot, for McKay's vision of America "does not evoke the image of a desolate zone, a cultural waste, where alienated human subjects live fragmentary existences." On the contrary, while acknowledging the profound alienation and violence experienced by racial minorities and cultural "outsiders," McKay also acknowledges America's many "wonders" and "priceless treasures." "Unerring" suggests that America's demise will not be a mistake, but McKay importantly contextualizes it within the phrase "Time's unerring hand," placing this demise within the cyclical rise and fall of empires. This perspective gives a weighty, perhaps even tragic element to the vision of America's fall, a fall which McKay does not depict as simply the personal fantasy of his speaker but rather as the inevitable result of America's own internal contradictions and the impermanence of worldly "might."
