Tiger (symbol)
McKay's early comparison of America to a tiger symbolizes the nation's inhuman violence and brutality, particularly towards its minority subjects and to cultural "outsiders." Like the similar comparisons to "mad and hungry dogs" and "monsters" in McKay's "If We Must Die," this metaphor pointedly reverses racist conceptions to suggest that it is in fact whites and white America that are animalistic and subhuman. However, here the specificity of "tiger" also allows McKay to develop the irony even further, using an "exotic" foreign animal to portray America as the one who is "Other." The tiger's ability to evoke at once predatory violence, otherness, and the stripes of the American flag made it a favorite symbol of McKay's, and he exploits its poetic potential even more readily in his poem "Tiger," declaring that "The white man is a tiger at my throat, / Drinking my blood as my life ebbs away, / And muttering that his terrible striped coat / Is Freedom's and portends the Light of Day."
America as Beloved (Allegory)
"America's" central conceit is that of America as a "she," and with this personification McKay readily invites comparisons to the sonnet form's traditional figure of the female beloved. Setting up the poem as a love poem thus enables McKay to "confess" his real love for America, as complex, contradictory, and qualified as that love is. But this conceit of America-as-beloved also allows McKay to subvert poetic conventions in productive and illuminating ways, like in his refusal to idealize his beloved and his suggestion that—unlike the traditional beloved immortalized in verse—America actually has an ominous end in sight. In developing this conceit, McKay is ultimately able to use this relationship between speaker and beloved in order to represent allegorically some of the complexities and difficulties of the black experience in America.
