Analysis of "If We Must Die" By Claude McKay

          The poem “If We Must Die”(1005) was written in 1919 by Claude McKay when the anti-blacks riots start to spread into other cities in Chicago where they chased blacks to kill them and send them back to their country. It is a sonnet that consists of fourteen-line with an intricate rhyme scheme. It has three quatrains; the first one of a,b, a,b rhyme scheme, the second one of c,d, c,d and the third one of e,f, e,f, and it has one concluded couplet of g,g. Since the poem not divided into stanzas, the poetic structure would be stitchic for the poem. There is a use of enjambment where the line of a poem elongates to the next one to get the full meaning of it. 

          In the first quatrains, where the poetic speaker set the sense of the battle. From the first line through the second one, it showed the poetic speaker talking with his fellow blacks were the word “we”(I.   1.) referred to them. He’s saying that if they die, then they shouldn’t let themselves dies “like hugs”(I.   1.) which he used that word metaphorically meaning that to not die and get hunted in an offensive zone that would make them full of shame and dishonour. Then on the third line, he defined the hunters who are the whites as the “dogs”(I.   3.) who are chasing the blacks madly with the hunger to kill them, and not to allow the white to taunt them for their eventful life. In the second quatrain, the poetic speaker tries to incite the blacks not to be coward from whites. He repeated the line “If we must die”(I.   5.) to stresses how it was important for that fight to die with glory and honor. Explaining in the next line that dying “nobly”(I.   5.) so that all the blood does not go to waste, and here he steps into the sixth line in the poem where he uses the enjambment as he used it in the first and second line. Then he continued through that line crossing it to the seventh line where he say that dying "nobly" fighting the “monsters”(I.   7.) would make the honors even after their death. Moreover, in the third quatrain, the speaker called the black “kinsmen”(I.   9.) as a way to show how they are all connected even if they are not from the same family blood; calling for them to gather for their “common”(I.   9.) enemy. Then he continues by saying that even when the whites dominate them in number let show the courage and fight, and for all numerous attacks the white do the blacks will give back one killing offense that can’t compare to their enormous number. Also in the twelfth line “What though before we lie the open grave?”(I.   10.) The speaker telling the black in the form of a question that if you fight back or not they will die, but what lies in between is the grave that the white want blacks to be in and to cause death. Therefore, in the last two lines of the poem, he said to not be in that grave they should stand against those murder and “cowardly packs”(I.   13.). He stated that since the white when they want to kill a black they would come as a group to kill him since they knew how powerful the blacks are. He concluded the poem by saying even if they were pushed back to a wall in a fight, they should continue fighting until they die to the end.

          The speaker in this poem is promoting the blacks to keep on fighting and to be brave even if they know they would die. At the beginning of the poem the poetic speaker described blacks by using animals metaphor, but in the ninth line, he changed it into a human language where he described the black as his people who relate to him as in the same culture and situation of suffering. Also, since the poem is the sonnet, the theme usually love, and here it was the love of black nationalism.This poem shows how much evil infect the blacks at that time and how despite all that misery stayed one hand to fight that injustice as if they were members of one family.