Textual History

This poem also appears in Cambridge Magazine Summer, 1920 [#] The Spanish Needle Cambridge Magazine Summer, 1920 55 .

Notes

  • Editorial Notes ?

Formats

The Spanish Needle1

  1. Lovely dainty Spanish needle

  2. With your yellow flower and white,

  3. Dew bedecked and softly sleeping,

  4. Do you think of me to-night?

  5. Shadowed by the spreading mango,

  6. Nodding o'er the rippling stream,

  7. Tell me, dear plant of my childhood,

  8. Do you of the exile dream?

  9. Do you see me by the brook's side

  10. Catching crayfish 'neath the stone,

  11. As you did the day you whispered:

  12. Leave the harmless dears alone?

  13. Do you see me in the meadow

  14. Coming from the woodland spring

  15. With a bamboo on my shoulder

  16. And a pail slung from a string?

  17. Do you see me all expectant

  18. Lying in an orange grove,

  19. While the swee-swees2 sing above me,

  20. Waiting for my elf-eyed love?

  21. Lovely dainty Spanish needle,

  22. Source to me of sweet delight,

  23. In your far-off sunny southland

  24. Do you dream of me to-night?

Contents:

Harlem Shadows (1922)

Additional Poems by Claude McKay

Contemporary Reviews

Supplementary Texts