The Lynching

“The Lynching” begins at the climax of the conflict it portrays. The sonnet tells the story of a Black man unjustly hanged by a white mob, but the poem begins at the moment of his death. The first line informs the audience that the man’s spirit has ascended in the “smoke” (Line 1) created from his own burned body up to “high heaven” (Line 1), beginning the poem at the moment he perishes. McKay continues the progression of the man’s spirit as it is “bidden” (Line 3) to the father’s “bosom once again” (Line 3). Upon his death, the man’s spirit or soul leaves for heaven and is reunited with God for all eternity.

However, McKay deliberately complicates any attempt to find comfort in the man’s death by assuming his soul is in eternity. When describing how the man’s spirit departed his body, he writes, “His father, by the cruelest way of pain, / Had bidden him to his bosom” (Lines 2-3). While the language is deliberately evocative of Christian doctrine (see Symbols & Motifs section) and the word “father” is biblically associated with God, McKay does not capitalize the word “father” in the poem, which would clarify if the father referred to was God.