The speaker in “Joy in the Woods” laments early on that he is “hired” (Line 10), that is, he has been sold, at least figuratively, to work: “On my brow an unfading frown / And hate in my heart always” (Lines 7, 8). There are perhaps no more powerful words in McKay’s lamentation over the enslavement of work than “unfading” and “always” (Lines 7,8). The speaker's condition will never improve, never change, never satisfy. McKay, whose father proudly traced his ancestral roots to West Africa, and who sojourned throughout the American South after he emigrated from Jamaica, does not use the metaphor of enslavement lightly. McKay understood the reality of slavery, chaining generations of Africans and compelling them to work in brutal conditions in the Deep South without hope of ever being released from that onerous life on the pain of being hunted down like animals.

If modern work does not absolutely follow that grim historical model, McKay argues, it is only a difference in degree, not of kind. The poem poses anything but rhetorical questions. If the modern worker cannot choose not to work, what is the alternative? Where is the worker to go? How would the worker provide for himself or his family? Where is the freedom? Just to survive in a capitalist culture—and prospering is not even an option—with something to eat, something to wear, and a place to live requires wholly abandoning the heart and the soul, allowing them to fade into irony: “Forced to go on through fear / For every day I must eat” (Lines 11, 12).