Second quatrain: "All night" to "the swinging char."
Summary
The poem's next quatrain is another envelope stanza focused entirely on the "lone and solitary star" watching over the scene through the night. McKay's description of the star alludes to both the Star of Bethlehem and the North Star, but again he very consciously creates a comparison that does not hold up: here the star does not provide the guidance that the allusion would suggest. While the speaker's remark that the star "gave him up" carries connotations of betrayal, he also states that the star “hung pitifully” over the victim, hinting with the strategic “hung” that the star itself may be a victim of the lynching. This implication suggests that the star cannot help the victim regardless of whether or not it "pities" him, and McKay's clear subversion of the idea of a guiding star illustrates that the victim has no such luxuries in the unjust world the poem represents.
Analysis
In both this section and the one before it, McKay makes it so that the victim is never the subject of the sentence but always the one acted upon, and even the way that McKay describes the star in this section suggests an indifferent cosmos, heightening the sense of the victim’s isolation and helplessness. The fact that the victim is dead before the poem even starts only further suggests his lack of agency, revealing a world where racial violence is a foregone conclusion. And while McKay could have used this description of a "solitary" night to offer at least a hint of respite or of peace, he instead describes the body as "swinging"—and later, "swaying"—to show that even in death the victim's body is not granted any stillness and peace.
In the lines that speculate about the “bright and solitary star,” a lexicon of chance further reveals the poem’s intense pessimism: “(Perchance the [star] that ever guided him, / Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)." Here the word “perchance” and the use of parentheses deepen the poem's sense of despair, implying that it does not even matter if it was the same star or not, since the victim is dead and there is nothing anyone can do about it. The description of “Fate’s wild whim” also subverts the notion of an ordered and meaningful universe; instead, the poem depicts a capricious Fate that has no qualms about sending another African American to death. When after the parentheses McKay gives us one final line about the night, before moving into his concluding sestet, we might at first think he is finishing laying out a problem that the rest of the poem will attempt to conclude, explain, or resolve. However, the description of the following morning in the next 6 lines only magnifies the horrors of the previous 8, and the final word of the octave—"char"—actually introduces a new focus on dehumanization and objectification that will continue throughout the rest of the poem.
