My Valued Ruby: Poems — A Closer Reading

Love as Fragile and Enduring

Love in these poems is often figured as a rose: beautiful, delicate, and subject to decay. In "Faded Love," the speaker mourns a love that "faded like a rose for the want of dew," while "The Breath of a Rose" compares a beloved's soul to that same fragrance. The tension between permanence and loss runs through many pieces. "Always" insists on constancy—"There's always a look in your eyes, / There's always a rose in your smile"—yet the same poem admits "There's always a cloudy day." Even in celebration, McGee undercuts certainty: "All, in a moment it can leave us" ("All"). The poems rarely settle into pure joy; they hold hope and sorrow together.

Dialect and the Vernacular Voice

Several poems employ African American dialect, a choice that signals both cultural specificity and literary tradition. "After de Toun Hall Supper" and "E'er Januwah De 2" appear alongside standard-English lyrics, creating a contrast in register. The dialect pieces often treat everyday scenes—a supper, a frosty morning—with a rhythmic, colloquial cadence. In "Humin to De Air," the speaker muses on nature in a voice distinct from the more formal love poems. This juxtaposition suggests McGee was working within multiple poetic modes, perhaps addressing different audiences or exploring different facets of experience. The dialect poems ground the collection in a particular community and its speech patterns.

Moral Reflection and Social Observation

Not all poems are love lyrics. "The Convict" tells of a man imprisoned for "keeping bad company," ending with a warning: "Steal not from yourself nowadays / For your work is your boss." "The Evils of Alcohol" and "Natural Born Colored Man" address social issues directly, while "Democracy" and "The Star of Liberia" hint at political themes. These poems sit alongside personal meditations like "A Poet's Dark Day" and "A Poet's Power," suggesting that McGee saw poetry as both private expression and public commentary. The range—from a convict's lament to a lover's plea—gives the collection a breadth that resists easy categorization.

Readers approaching My Valued Ruby will find a poet working across registers and moods. The dialect poems reward attention to rhythm and vernacular phrasing, while the love poems gain power from their repeated images of roses and breath. McGee's moral pieces, though sometimes didactic, anchor the collection in the concerns of its time. The book invites reading as a whole, where contrasts between voices and themes create a fuller picture of the poet's craft.

The rain kept time with the slow turn of pages in McGee’s rose-heavy lines, until I paused too long on a poem about lost voices. That stillness carried me, almost by accident, to another shelf, where Apollo and Marsyas, and Other Poems — A Closer Reading waited, its own quiet tension between beauty and wound echoing what I’d just felt. The afternoon folded into both.