The Lynching

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1922

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

The form and meter of McKay’s “The Lynching” combine elements of different poetic traditions. At 14 lines, the poem adopts the form of a sonnet, composed of three quatrains (a stanza of four lines) and a final rhyming couplet. While the poem initially seems to closely adhere to the traditional sonnet form, closer inspection reveals McKay deliberately subverts and adjusts the sonnet form for his purposes. The poem follows an ABBA CDDC EFFE GG rhyme scheme, which combines elements of the two major sonnet traditions. A typical Shakespearean sonnet follows an ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme, rhyming every other line until the final couplet. Split into an octave (a stanza of eight lines) and a sestet (a stanza of six lines) rather than three quatrains and a couplet, the Petrarchan sonnet either follows an ABBAABBA CDECDE or ABBAABBA CDCCDC rhyme scheme. Like the Shakespearean sonnet form, “The Lynching” contains three distinct quatrains that do not share rhymes and a rhyming couplet. However, like the Petrarchan sonnet, McKay’s poem does not rhyme every other line but instead rhymes in an ABBA pattern. McKay does not strictly adhere to either sonnet tradition but incorporates certain structural elements of each form to create his own distinct rhythm.

McKay loosely borrows another element of the Shakespearean sonnet. The majority of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written in iambic pentameter, a line structure consisting of 10 syllables in a pattern of unstressed then stressed syllables. While McKay’s poem mostly maintains its iambic pentameter, there are a number of lines with varying syllable counts. The poem’s first line is composed of 12 syllables while others contain 11 (Lines 3, 4, and 11). By fusing different sonnet rhyme schemes and varying the poem’s meter, McKay adopts elements of the Western literary tradition but twists that tradition into something new, creating his own unique, almost paradoxical genre of “protest sonnets” (Lederer, Richard. “The Didactic and the Literary in Four Harlem Renaissance Sonnets.” The English Journal, vol. 62, no. 2, 1973, p. 221).

Alliteration

Throughout the poem, McKay employs several sonic techniques, most notably alliteration. Alliteration is the deliberate repetition of a sound at the beginning of two or more adjacent or closely located words. From the very beginning of the poem, McKay uses alliteration to describe the man’s death, referring to his soul ascending to “high heaven” (Line 1) while a “solitary star” (Line 5) watches in the night sky. He questions Fate’s “wild whim” (Line 7). He observes how the “crowds came” to look at the body once “day dawned” (Line 9), and he portrays the white women who never “showed sorrow” (Line 12) and the “little lads, lynchers” (Line 13) who took glee in the murder. In each instance, McKay uses alliteration to emphasize the bleakness and severity of what he is describing and to generate a more forceful rhythm. The expression “little lads, lynchers” is a jarring juxtaposition of children with murderers, and the bitterness and anger behind the expression is facilitated by the stresses caused by alliteration. Furthermore, the repeated consonant sounds of “wild whim” and “day dawned,” for instance, create additional stresses that further stretch the bounds of the poem’s loose iambic pentameter.

End Stops

While “The Lynching” does contain some uses of enjambment, the rhythm of the poem largely relies on clearly end-stopped lines. Enjambment occurs when one line of poetry flows into the next without any interrupting punctuation. In “The Lynching,” McKay uses enjambment three times (Lines 5, 9, and 11), but the majority of the lines end with some kind of pause created by punctuation. The poem’s first line reads, “His spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven.” Without any introduction, McKay thrusts his reader into a moment in which his character has already died, and the abrupt punctuation of the period at the line’s end limits any further information. The use of an end stop here ensures the line’s thought is self-contained and lacking in further context. Similarly, McKay uses an end stop in the fourth line to emphatically assert that the “sin” of lynching “remained still unforgiven.” McKay deliberately alternates between enjambment, lesser punctuation like commas, and full end stops in each line to create a sense of finality and severity to specific statements.