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Poetic Analysis of 'If We Must Die' by Claude McKay

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still being drawn. Abraham Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 may have officially liberated African Americans from slavery, but the prejudices of American society refused to completely set them free.  Jim Crow laws reigned supreme, and the segregation creed of "separate but equal" took precedence over the Declaration of Independences, "All men are created equal." While many African  Americans appeared to ambivalently accept their status as second-class citizens, attitudes began to change after World War I. African Americans began expressing their displeasure in art - music, paintings,  and literature. One of the most eloquent spokesmen for the African-American struggle for social and political equality was Jamaican-born poet, Claude McKay. In 1919, McKay penned "If We  Must Die," an emotionally charged poem which resonated with its themes of death with honor, particularly poignant in postwar America. McKay recalled, "The World War had ended. But  its end was a signal for the outbreak of little wars between labor and capital and, like a plague breaking out in sore places, between colored folk and white.  Our Negro newspapers were morbid, full of details of clashes between colored and white, murderous shootings and hangings... It was during those days that the sonnet, If We Must Die,  exploded out of me" (McKay on "If We Must Die"). Somewhat surprisingly, McKay elected to structure his impassioned contemporary poem in the poetic style known as sonnet, which is originally  attributed to the fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarch, and forever immortalized in the romantic prose of William Shakespeare and John Milton (Williams 24). Traditionally, a sonnet is composed of  fourteen lines, and consists of three quatrains and a concluding couplet. The sonnet also follows a specific rhyme scheme or pattern. With "If We Must Die," McKay