Night, Death, Mississippi

It would seem, given the subject matter, the poem would reflect the moral chaos and the emotional strife manifested in a lynching. On its surface, however, “Night, Death, Mississippi” looks, formally, like a traditional poem. The poem breaks into nine quatrains (stanzas with four lines each). The poem itself is neatly broken into two broad sections, separated by Roman numerals. The first centers on the drama of the Southern man listening with approval, even relish to the sounds of the killing of the Black men by the Klan; the second section focuses on the return of the man’s son, who comes back from the attack exhilarated over his participation in the Klan attack. Between the quatrains in the second part are single italicized lines that act as a kind of broad perspective on the night’s attack, giving the toxic responses of the Southern family a moral critique that reveals the immorality and viciousness of the Klan attack.

Thus, Hayden’s poem is one thing formally and something quite different thematically. Given the horror of the action that the poem suggests (no direct description of the lynching is given, the poem offering only the howls of the victims and the bloodied shirt of one of the killers), the poem’s form suggests control, design, and tidiness.