This is definitely not under the banner of my #winterlight offerings, because it’s not particularly encouraging, but rather… thinky. I’m grateful for the friends who have dragged me into poetry practice, and for my Deeper Dive poetry group, whose exercises help me to look differently at the poetry I read.
This week, my group read several mentor poems which touched on grief or despair, and using repetition, direct address and present tense voice lead the poem towards a commonality of experience, allowing the reader to both feel and release their own similar emotions. Yesterday I wrote a draft of a poem describing the rise and fall of Allensworth, CA, the first township in my home state to be founded, financed, and governed by African-Americans – the “Buffalo soldiers,” of the Civil War. I have been fiddling with the idea of writing historical fiction set in this town – or writing fantastical fiction about magical happenings in this town. All of this is still in the very bubbling-stew-of-imagination stages.
Today I’m attempting to look objectively at another poem from the Harlem Renaissance using the same tools as we identified yesterday. If this has a lot of the tone of an English paper, that’s because I think I fall back on the strategies that worked for me in my upper level English courses. Additionally, writing things down is sometimes a way that I further process and remember them. So, aren’t you glad to be here to crib my notes for the test on Monday? Enjoy! 😂
If We Must Die
by Claude McKay
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
…
(Do read the rest at The Poetry Foundation.)
Born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica in 1889, Claude McKay loved English literature and studied and wrote poetry as a young man – about his feelings, about the world around him, and about the things he observed. Logically, we know McKay observed a great deal of racism – both in his home nation, and during his lifetime in the United States. The themes of both his poetry and novels reflect this. The poem, “If We Must Die” is one of his best known, and most celebrated, not just among the Black community, but more on that later. The feel of the poem is, despite its formal tone, in some ways very American – very macho. “Mejor morir a pie que vivir en rodillas,” right? Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. (This quotation attributed to Emiliano Zapata, 1877-1919, and quoted by FDR in 1941 when receiving an honorary doctorate from Oxford University – apparently meant to be encouragement to a war-stressed Britain.)
Many times, poems which deal in difficult topics use the natural world as a foil, pointing to the continuous cycles of nature as a contrast to the brevity of the human cycle. While McKay does mention hogs and dogs, he mentions them in a disturbing similarity to human beings – Black people chased down, cornered, and executed like hogs, white people like baying hounds, harrying them and running them down. While it at first seemed to me a departure from his animal metaphor when he urges the subject of the poem to make the ‘monsters’ pay for every drop of blood shed, I thought about how dangerous hogs are to come across in the woods. Even if you’re not hunting them, you don’t want to run afoul of them – they’re aggressive, and they’ll come after you if they’re even startled. Like the 1546 proverb said, “Even a worm will turn.” Even the meekest and most docile of the animal kingdom can be pushed too far, and the Black man McKay describes with such polished, formal language is apparently a man pushed outside of his natural bent for civility and calm – or, at least his language seems to imply that’s man’s natural bent, anyway.
That high-toned language and …the poem’s precise shine in general seems deliberate. The poem is a Shakespearean sonnet, with all of the structure this rule-bound form allows – and with all of the history and travel that the sonnet implies, from thirteenth century Italy to 1500’s England to the more recent pen of a Jamaican-born Black man. With this history and through this distance, McKay speaks to a certain kind of reader – to men, ostensibly, as the poem cries out to “O, Kinsmen!” at one point, and readers are encouraged to die “like men.” Those kinsmen could be American men, or McKay’s fellow Afro-Caribbean immigrants. Today I learned that there is an urban myth that Winston Churchhill (!!!! NB: there is no record of it, so this is wholly mythical and sourced from people’s memories at the time) read this poem aloud on the radio during the siege of London in 1940. Because this sonnet lacks specific identifying markers – the “We” who must die are called “kinsmen” and “men” and their oppressors simply “monsters” – the clarion call of standing with one’s back to the wall and fighting to the death, couched in the scholarly lines of a very European poetic form makes it allegedly relatable even to the Prime Minister of England. Who knows – maybe the poem is intended to speak to long-ago Italians and Englishmen as well. McKay’s direct address invokes whatever present moment the reader finds themselves in, which is often claustrophobically close in the ‘painful topic’ poem genre, and gives the reader a sense of tempus fugit – of a time that is fleeing, and so right this minute you must listen to the poet, and hear his wisdom, which may not be available beyond this epoch. I imagine the narrator running, ghostlike, along with a person fleeing a lynching, urging him to not just run but to consider stopping and making a last stand instead, to make the monsters pay. Even with these sterling words and high tone, though, it’s hard to imagine someone running for their life being very open to the whole thing.
The long-ranging discussion of violence and non-violence, of “By Any Means Necessary” and passive protest is present in this poem, but wrapped in the idea of nobility and honor. Is it better to “nobly die” not like a slaughtered hog, but “fighting back?” Or will you still be just dead? McKay definitely seems to believe that an honorable death is the best death – but the jury’s still out.
Thank you for coming to my English Lit discussion.
EDITED TO ADD: Can you believe that Susan @Chicken Spaghetti is also celebrating the poetry of Claude McKay today??? What are the chances?
Thank you, Professor T, for this lecture.
No, seriously. Thanks! This reminds me of Pádraig Ó Tuama’s essays that go along with the poems in the Poetry Unbound app (and books). Reading the poem, then the essay, then going back to the poem makes it such a richer poetry experience.
@Cousin MaryLee: Wow – if I can sound like Pádraig Ó Tuama in any way, my day is pretty much permanently made. Thank you so much.) My friend Sarah told me he visited her son’s school and that he is as genuinely lovely as he sounds on the radio.) Especially with older poems from very different times and places from my immediate experience, I am trying to be more mindful of reading critically and placing the poem in its milieu – as I was, in fact, taught in school, but don’t find myself automatically doing all the time anymore. I think just reading poems sometimes isn’t the point – it’s giving myself another way to enter into it and make it a part of me.
Tanita, I’m still catching my breath from, “I imagine the narrator running, ghostlike, along with a person fleeing a lynching, urging him to not just run but to consider stopping and making a last stand instead, to make the monsters pay.” I was thinking of Ahmaud Arbery… I don’t know whether the running or making a last stand is the better choice. And I’m heartsick that the decision still has to be made today. Thanks for sharing your thinking!
@laurasalas: Oh, Mr. Arbery. He didn’t have a chance to do anything but mind his business and jog, God rest him. I definitely think he would have some opinion of Claude McKay’s ideas! And this is why I like exploring historical poetry – I don’t know what direction a contemporary person like Mr. Arbery would have taken this (and I’m angry because we’ll never know), but I can’t help but think that the range of a good poem takes us many places as we consider the meanings of the then vs. the now… which is always worth pondering, to me.
I enjoyed every bit, Tanita! And, I smiled when I read of that myth of Churchhill reading this sonnet. It really isn’t a surprise, if true. When I’ve read of him, I know he looked for every possible way to offer support to those enduring the war at home, & the news abroad. And, as I read McKay’s words, I thought you were giving them to us for today’s fight. A poet’s words has meaning so personal, do they not, that we each may take solace, or sometimes umbrage) at a poem. Thanks for all!
@lindabaie: I think at first I *was* thinking of Claude McKay’s poem in terms of our current…”moment,” but because this is Black History Month and he’s an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, I cast my net a bit wider, trying to think in terms of what the poem meant to him as a naturalized citizen, as a Black person, as a man who wrote at length about his issues with the way he saw himself vs. the way the larger dominant society saw him… In THIS case, indeed, standing and fighting would make sense; in his case… the appeal to nobly dying kind of gave me pause!
Hi, Tanita. I’m trying to work around whatever cookies WordPress left on my computer with an now-defunct photo blog and seeing if I can comment. I sent you an email about your terrific post, so this is a test!
@Susan Thomsen: IT WORKS!!!
Tanita, I love a good English Lit discussion and I loved reading this. 🙂 I also love Claude McKay. I researched him a while back for a possible project (that hasn’t gone anywhere) and fell in love with his poetry and personality.
I think you nailed the power of a poem like this when you said:
“McKay’s direct address invokes whatever present moment the reader finds themselves in, which is often claustrophobically close in the’painful topic’ poem genre, and gives the reader a sense of tempus fugit – of a time that is fleeing, and so right this minute you must listen to the poet, and hear his wisdom, which may not be available beyond this epoch.”
Then you also ground us in the terrifying realities when you say:
“I imagine the narrator running, ghostlike, along with a person fleeing a lynching, urging him to not just run but to consider stopping and making a last stand instead. With these sterling words and high tone, it’s hard to imagine someone running for their life being very open to the whole thing.”
This poem is so specific and so universal, all wrapped into one amazing package. Thanks for the pondering this morning. I could do this all day. 🙂
I hope you write the Allensworth book. BookS? xo
@Karen Edmisten: Oh, thank you. And, I’d LOVE to read your project someday! I hope you get back to it!
Thank you for this discussion! And that bubbling part of the process is so hopeful–I hope it turns into a project because it sounds like a fascinating one.
@Marcie Flinchum Atkins: I really hadn’t realized how much historical fiction spoke to me until I started reading more middle grade and shifted gears to that age group. Maybe an actual historical account would work well as a novel-in-verse – I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on yours!
Tanita, thank you for the literature lesson. I enjoyed reading your analysis of Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die.” I will look forward to someday reading your historical fiction or magical fiction about life in Allensworth, CA!
@Denise Krebs: Thank you! ♥
Thanks for sharing this powerful poem Tanita, the ending, “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,/
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” a call so vivid and full of magnitude! It reminds me of the painting “Third of May,” by Francisco de Goya: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-goyas-third-may-forever-changed-way-war By the way I thoroughly enjoyed the history lesson!
@Michelle K: Oh, thank you so much for adding your artistic lens to my view! I think the imagery in the painting and the writing of the poem were all of a certain time – speaking to a certain frame of mind…