The Tropics in New York

Although the title announces that the poem is set in New York, the recurring motif is the speaker’s tropical or semitropical homeland. Other than establishing the location outside a grocery store that has a window display, the images in the first two stanzas point away from the city. The grocery store has merely imported its display of fruit from somewhere else, and that other location is the exclusive focus of Lines 6-8. Those lines evoke an enchanting country setting far away from what one imagines is a bleak city street. The details of that street (other than the enticing shop window) are left to the imagination because the poet gives them no attention. It is the lure of the tropical locale that draws him on, and it is the vividness of it that remains in the speaker’s mind in the final stanza, in which he also returns to an awareness of his own present circumstances. The featureless street serves only as the place—the not-tropical, the not-fondly remembered—where his sorrow and regret are finally placed on view.