Lines 5-10: "Her vigor flows" to "word of jeer."
Summary
The second section of "America" comprises the second quatrain and half of the third, made up of two complete sentences of three lines each. The first sentence continues to depict the speaker's complex attitude towards America, describing with repeated comparisons to water ("like tides," "like a flood") the ways in which America paradoxically inspires the speaker against aspects of America herself. As the sonnet moves into its second half in line 8—signaled by "yet," a parallel to the "although" with which the poem began—the speaker turns to more explicitly political language to describe his defiance. Despite his announced rebellion, however, the speaker insists he holds no ill will towards America. His image of a "shred" of malice evokes an animal's claw, recalling the earlier metaphor of America as a tigress. But "not a shred" clearly differentiates his own disposition from that of America, and, unlike the "mad and hungry dogs" that "mock" of the speaker in McKay's "If We Must Die," here the speaker claims that he holds "not a word of jeer" towards the nation that oppresses him.
Analysis
In this second section, McKay continues to develop the relationship between America and the speaker by referring to the body, although here the formerly vampiric image of America sucking the life out of him has shifted to an image of revivification: now America's strength flows into his "blood" and rejuvenates him. While "vigor" suggests America's strength and vitality, the speaker does avoid using overly positive words in his depiction, referring rather neutrally to America's "bigness" as opposed to her grandeur, greatness, or magnificence. Further undermining any sense of America's greatness is the speaker's blatant simile of "as a rebel fronts a king in state," a reference to monarchical rule that pointedly undermines America's self-conception as a country of liberty and democracy. Yet if this line implies that America is much more reactionary and autocratic than it thinks, the speaker claims that—rather unlike a typical rebel—he does not hold a grudge against his antagonist, and notably this line is the only explicitly political language in the entire poem.
In fact, McKay depicts his speaker's resistance to America not through any kind of ideological register but through the language of sexuality and masculine virility. In his description of America's "vigor" helping the speaker to resist her "hate," McKay creates an erotic image of the speaker "standing erect," a depiction of masculine potency and sexuality which McKay explicitly posits as antagonistic ("against") to his feminized America. While McKay ties America to images of flowing water in a very traditional association of liquidity and femininity, the line's repeated "t" sounds ("strength erect against her hate)" disrupt this sense of flow in their depiction of masculine hardness and firmness. In light of these associations, the speaker's later "I stand within her walls" also takes on an erotic reading, again linking the speaker's chafing against America's constraints to his forceful masculine sexuality. Yet playing on a tradition that goes back at least to John Donne's conception of sonnets as "pretty rooms," the reference to "walls" here also refers to "America" as the sonnet's walls, suggesting how McKay himself "rebels" within the constraints of the sonnet to develop the powerfully radical potential of this traditional poetic form.
