If We Must Die By Claude Mckay Analysis

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Recommended: Poems written during the Harlem Renaissance

Claude McKay During the Harlem Renaissance, African American poets expressed their need for equality and their struggle in America so far. Poets attempted to act like a match that would start the fire and hunger for equality. Poets like Claude McKay would help other African Americans realize how American mistreated them. African Americans thought that America would help bring them freedom, but McKay woke them from the dream that many had. McKay did not just tear people from the precious dreams they had he also tried to call people to action to gain equality. Claude McKay is known for expressing the African American struggle in America and acts as a voice of action. Claude McKay is a well known poet from Jamaica during the Harlem Renaissance,
McKay expresses his enemy as a pack of dogs stating that they are “mad and hungry dogs”. He also states that the pack of dogs mock their prey. The dogs are supposed to represent the white men and how they treated African Americans at the time. The poem is simply stating let us (African Americans) die in peace and do not push us to death or torture us. This poem acts as call to action for African Americans to rise up and not let the whites treat them like this. In two lines in the poem McKay states, “If we must die, let it not be like hogs” “If we must die, O let us nobly die,”. McKay is trying to emphasize to African Americans to not let these white men who think they are above everyone else kill them mentally and physically. He is also to trying to emphasize to not let the white men kill them in their foolish ways, and to take a stand fight for equality so they will die nobly. Wagner discusses again how McKay’s poem can rally African Americans together, “[With the publication of “If We Must Die” McKay became] the incarnation of the new spirit and the spokesman for a whole people at last resolved to witness no longer, in registration and submissiveness, the massacre of its own brothers at the hands of the enraged white mob, but to return blow for blow and , if necessary, to die” (Wagner). The poem paints a picture of battle scene where a captain or a general is trying to rally his troops up. It is trying to get their blood pumping and get them ready to fight a battle whether it be verbally or

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