The Inevitability of Death
Death is the poem's main theme, invoked in the title, the first and last line, and many times in between. Indeed, the sense of impending death is the poem's sine qua non, and while the speaker clearly has no morbid desire for death for death's sake, he acknowledges death without hesitation, encouraging his allies not just to face death but to deliver it to their "common foe." If in this vision there are thus no alternatives to death, there is nevertheless a right and wrong way to die. The speaker spends his 14 lines advocating for a noble death that will allow the dead to live on through their glory, and his rhyme on "die/defy" importantly suggests that a valiant death is not an acquiescence but a defiance.
The Value of Honor
One of the things that seems to have given the poem its universal appeal is its reference to highly traditional notions of bravery, glory, and heroism. The poet Melvin B. Tolson described the poem's theme as "ignobleness versus nobleness in man's tragedy," highlighting the imbrication of ideals of nobility and masculinity and invoking a classical sense of "tragedy." Despite vicious antagonism and a divided social fabric, the poem importantly suggests that friend and foe still share a common sense of nobility: even the "monsters" will have to "honor" the fallen if they fought nobly. These ideals might seem fundamentally antithetical to the poem's post-World War I moment, where millions of men had just died in a long and senseless war that for many proved the futility of "glory" and "heroism." However, here McKay draws on much older poetic and cultural traditions, arguing for a "timeless" sense of valor that in this case makes a meaningful death possible.
Humanity vs. Animality
While the speaker's rhetoric, in general, is organized around a binary, us-versus-them opposition, this often takes on the specific form of human versus non-human. Throughout the poem, the speaker encourages his allies to realize their humanity through the embrace of heroic ideals, and he also condemns their enemy as vicious inhuman "monsters." Moreover, if we read the "us" in the poem as referring to African Americans, then these nonhuman descriptions condemn the racist rhetoric of the time and assert that it is the racist whites who are actually subhuman and animal-like.
Masculinity as an Ideal
Related to the theme of human/non-human is the theme of masculinity, and indeed the phrase "like men" at the end of the poem explicitly contrasts with the earlier "like hogs," which equates submission to the enemy with a degraded and emasculated state. Both the third quatrain and the final couplet begin by affirming the allies' masculinity, and "like men" in particular depicts "manliness" as an ideal to be attained rather than a given condition of being a man. In the rhetoric and logic of the poem, then, humanity—and its values of honor, glory, and worth—is ineluctably tied up with masculinity, and as the critic Marcellus Blount states, "whatever the position of women, for McKay this is a battle between men."
The Need for Resistance
Unlike many other works in the Harlem Renaissance that followed, "If We Must Die" encourages violent resistance, and the poem's powerful case for resistance has no doubt contributed to its broad and longstanding appeal. The key word "defy" at the poem's halfway point encourages outright opposition, even when that means death, and the speaker clearly sees violence as justified when responding to murder and oppression. Still, what the speaker invokes here is not guerrilla warfare but a more literary notion of meeting face-to-face in battle, and the poem is not meant to describe a nuanced politics or a literal project of resistance but to provoke the right emotions in its audience.
The Importance of the Collective
Strikingly, and rather unusually for McKay, "If We Must Die" refuses the "I" of the modern lyric poem in favor of the plural pronouns "we," "us," and "our." McKay further develops this sense of a collective or public through the tone and style of his poem, which, though encountered on the page, is just as easy to imagine as a verbal speech to a crowd. While writers often use sonnets to address a single lover (real or imagined), McKay conceives of his audience in terms of a mass public, attempting to band his "kinsmen" together even if the whole world stands against them.
Freedom and Free Will
One of the subtler lexical patterns in the poem is words of constraint ("penned," "constrained," "pressed"), which McKay applies to both sides in the conflict. To shape its negative depiction of surrender in the first quatrain, the poem relies not just on the comparison to hogs but on the sense that not resisting will mean being "penned" and surrounded. And at the end of the poem, the speaker returns to an image of constraint—"pressed to the wall"—but now encourages us to picture not an execution but valiant men fighting to the bitter end. Since the poem suggests a reality where death will come regardless, it does not encourage attempts to circumvent or resist the impending death. Instead, the speaker suggests that true freedom comes in accepting fate and dying nobly, which will force oppressors to show one honor after death. Much of the power of the poem itself, however, comes from the fact that McKay does not, in Tolson's words, "hog-tie the free will of the attacked by the imposition of an affirmative decision." By using words like "if" and "let" in the beginning, the speaker builds his case slowly, so that when he unequivocally states in the final couplet that "we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack," the audience has presumably already decided to join him of their own accord.
