For my poetry genre post, I will be looking at racial prejudice in The Lynching by Claude McKay. Due to it being a fairly short poem, I will include the whole of it in my post. It can also be found in The Norton Anthology: American Literature shorter 8th edition V.2 1865 to present on page 927:
The Lynching by Claude Mckay
1 His spirit is smoke ascended to high heaven.
2 His father, by the cruelest way of pain,
3 Had bidden him to his bosom once again;
4The awful sin remained still unforgiven.
5 All night a bright and solitary star
6 Yet gave him up at last to Fate's wild whim)
7 Hung pitifully o'er the swinging char.
8 Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
9 The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
10 The women thronged to look, but never a one
11 Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
12 And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
13 Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.
According to Eji.com, a website focused on relieving social injustices and covering many different social movements, past and present, states that, between 1877 and 1950, at least 4,875 reported lynchings happened in the southern United States to cause racial terror. So this piece would be hitting on a very real and contemporary issue at the time of its publication in 1922.
What is interesting about this piece is that not only can you see the vivid hate African-Americans had for White Americans at the time, but the audience also begins to feel this way by the amazing descriptions portrait in the poem. To begin, we can see how much pain this caused. For example, the first two lines of the poem “His spirit is smoke ascended to high heaven. His father, by the cruelest way of pain”. The reader can easily visualise a man burning in agony and his soul ascending after strenuous torture. Then we are shown how white men and women, in lines 10-13, come to see the corpse, to dance and feel no sorrow towards it. The work is extremely effective in completing its task of making the audience feel repulsed at the actions within and to let them know that this is what African-Americans (at the time) were facing on a daily basis. It create the sympathy need to bring about change.
This poem shows just how far we have come with correcting social injustices but there are still many other issues related to race that need to be tackled such as wrongful imprisonment, discrimination, among others.
Works Cited
"Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror." Equal Justice Initiative. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2017.
McKay, Claude. "The Lynching." 1922. The Norton Anthology: American Literature. Shorter 8th Edition ed. Vol. 2. New York City: Norton, 2013. 927. Print. 1865 to the Present.
You nicely provide historical context for this poem. Your post makes me think about McKay's audience--who was he most writing this poem for, do you think? And is it effective for multiple audiences then and now?
ReplyDeleteI believe that this poem could have worked for both White and Black audiences. The purpose could be to get white to feel sympathy and to rile up Blacks and get them angry.
DeleteYou bring up a really good point on how the vivid descriptions make the poem's message effective. Lines 10-13, as you mentioned, very strongly conveyed how inhumanely people- white people- reacted to lynchings. When I read those lines, I felt those feelings of repulsion and disgust that were meant to be brought to surface. On another note, I think it is interesting how McKay only mentions the women and "little lads" towards the end. I wonder if McKay brings attention to them because they are bystanders, and could change this reality if they wanted to.
ReplyDeleteI believe that brings attention to them only at the end to fit the "story" into a chronological order.
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