The poem is centrally about moving to a new country and the struggle to fit in. Behind the speaker’s struggle is the assumption that people are defined by where they live. “When Dawn Comes to the City” is an unsettling exploration of the pain and panic of homesickness. The poet does not offer autobiographical context to explain the implications of the poem’s description. The poem, however, uses the juxtaposition of two settings—dawn in New York and dawn on an unnamed island—to express the emotional mindset of a first-generation immigrant at odds with his adopted country. He is distant from his native country because it has become less of a real-time geographical place and more of a fantasy, idealized and accessible only in moments of interior escape.

The poem investigates two different perspectives: documentarian realism and lyrical romanticism. New York is named because it is the setting of the poem; Jamaica is never mentioned by name because it feels unreal, distant, and inaccessible. For a first-generation immigrant, homesickness involves at its core questions about identity and specifically the relationship between the self and place.