The Lynching Essay Questions

What function do McKay's religious allusions serve?

While the poem's first quatrain alludes to several Christian concepts, McKay actually undercuts these allusions in order to critique the horrors carried out by the ostensibly "Christian" culture of the racist South. The fourth line's "awful sin" alludes to original sin, but here McKay writes that it remains unforgiven: this time the death of an innocent is not redemptive but fruitless and gratuitous. This failure is emphasized formally through the imperfect rhymes on heaven/unforgiven and pain/again, and, importantly, this religious lexicon disappears from the poem entirely after the first stanza, separating the "lynchers" and "crowds" from any notion of salvation.

How does "The Lynching" use the sonnet form as a means of critique?

McKay’s most important means of critique, and indeed the one that structures the entire poem, is his use of the sonnet form to describe an act of racial violence. This application of a traditional form of love poetry comments on the perverse love of lynchings in the U.S., and McKay also plays on the long tradition of sonnet sequences to underscore a similarly ingrained tradition of lynchings. Moreover, by the volta in this sonnet, the victim has become objectified, and while sonnets have objectified their subjects for hundreds of years, this nameless victim is not idealized but rather dehumanized. In contrast with the metaphorical violence against women that feminist scholars have uncovered in traditional sonnets, the violence against the victim in this sonnet is all too literal. By imbuing this traditional white form of love poetry with new radical potential, then, the form of the poem works to subvert our expectations, beginning a critique of this vicious culture that will extend throughout the poem.