Claude McKay who was born on September 1980 in Jamaica, wrote the poem "The Barrier." In 1912, he wrote two volumes of Jamaican dialect verse. Then in 1912, once noticed, he went to the United States (U.S). A few years later, 1914, McKay went to New York where he contributed regularly to the liberator then getting recognized by avant-garde he became leading journal of avant-garde politics and art. McKay came out as the first and most important militant voice of Harlem Renaissance. I conclude that this poem is about a black man complementing white woman on her beauty and telling the reader how the differences in color and race is keeping him and her apart. The first sentence in the poem, "I must not gaze at them although your eyes are dawning day, means that he must not stare at her eyes. And by saying "dawning days,  he is implying that her eyes are like a rising sunshine at dawn (first light). In the second sentences, "I must not watch you as you go your sun-illumined away,  he means that it is hard to watch her walk away. He refers to her eyes as sun-illumined which means sun illuminated or light- up eyes. In the first sentence of the second paragraph, he writes "I hear but I must never heed the fascinating note, which, fluting like a river reed, comes from your trembling throat  he wants to play attention to her beautiful voice and movement but knows he shouldn't. He writes, "heed which means to give careful attention." Here he is in love with her voice because he wants to pay careful attention to the sound and yet he has to pull back because he cannot do it. During the 1912's when McKay wrote this poem, love between blacks and white were prohibited so through his poem's he expresses his love for the white woman and having to suppress his feeling for her. In the second sentence of the second paragraph he writes, "Which, fluting like a river reed, comes from your trembling throat. He notices her voice is trembling and