While McKay's "The Lynching" is the most famous poem with that title, it is also not the only one. The Harlem Renaissance poet Dorothea Mathews also published a poem entitled "The Lynching" in Opportunity in 1928, and a comparison of the two poems provides a powerful illustration of the different ways writers chose to represent the horrors of lynching in verse. Mathew's short lyric is as follows:
He saw the rope, the moving mob,
And suddenly thought of quiet things;
The way the river-ripples sob,
The silver flight of pigeon's wings
Free in the blue September air;
And that the night was warm and brown—
Under the trees the shadows hung;
The little stars of God looked down.
While McKay and Mathews’s poems both come to similar conclusions, the two poems aim to elicit quite different emotional responses, and they deploy their poetic resources in dissimilar ways. In McKay’s poem, the sonnet form and bitter tone serve as an indictment of the perverse love of lynching in the U.S. When McKay writes of the spirit rising to “high heaven,” the star abiding over the scene, the women’s “blue” eyes, or the children who see the corpse, he uses images with strong connotations of love, purity, and hope. However, the poem quickly subverts expectations, making the “spirit” only “smoke,” the “awful sin” remain “unforgiven,” the star “abando[n]” the victim, the “steely” women show only cruelty, and the children dance “in fiendish glee.” But while everything in McKay's poem works to denounce anyone or anything complicit in this act, Mathews’s poem works to rouse the reader against lynching in a different way; she uses a lyric form to focus on nature and the interiority of the victim, and her poem provides a despondent emotional response to this tragic death. If McKay’s victim becomes dehumanized as a “char” and a “thing,” Mathews’s lyric allows a glimpse into her victim’s thoughts; this encourages us to sympathize with him more than to hate his tormentors, who the poem describes rather neutrally as a “moving mob.” Still, while her victim considers the beauty of nature, her lyric reminds us that nature cannot help the victim, and these images provide not hope but only profound sadness. In a subversion of expectations that is not unlike McKay’s, the river “sob[s],” the pigeon’s freedom in the “blue” sky only contrasts with the victim’s entrapment, and the poem’s description of the night, like the victim’s life itself, is suddenly cut short by the dash at the end of the line: “the night was warm and brown—.” And like McKay’s star that “hung” over the corpse, Mathews’s “little stars of God” look down on the scene; while not as mordant as McKay, then, Mathews similarly depicts a nature and a divinity that does nothing to stop these horrors. If McKay's notion of the incomparable horrors of lynching led him to avoid using any metaphors or similes in his sonnet, Mathews seems to take this even one step further by retreating from any depiction of the lynching at all after she so clearly evokes it ("rope," "mob") in the initial line.
