First Quatrain: "His Spirit in smoke" to "remained still unforgiven."
Summary
McKay's "The Lynching" is a uniquely crafted sonnet, combining aspects of both the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet forms. Like the Petrarchan sonnet, it opens with an "envelope stanza" in an ABBA pattern and can be broken down into an octave—the first 8 lines that describe the night of the lynching—and a sestet—the final 6 that describe the next day. Yet these final 6 lines do not follow the Petrarchan rhyme scheme, and like the Shakespearean sonnet the poem can also be broken down into 3 quatrains and a final rhyming couplet. The first quatrain describes in 4 heavily-end-stopped lines the immediate aftermath of a lynching, foregoing sensuous language or a physical description of the scene to focus instead on the meaning of the victim's death as his "Spirit" ascends to heaven. In doing so, the poem immediately establishes an allusion to Christ on the cross, but McKay pointedly refuses the explanatory power of this Christian context, not allowing the idea of martyrdom or redemption to mitigate the atrocity of the lynching.
Analysis
Opening with the carefully composed "His Spirit in smoke ascended," McKay creates a repeating pattern of "s" sounds (called "sibilance") which parallels the trails of smoke rising from the body. Coupled with the alliteration of "high heaven," this first line thus depends rather strongly on sound devices, and with this attention to the textures of language McKay demonstrates his aim to protest this horrific subject matter specifically as a poet. However, this interest in aesthetics does not at all mean that McKay sees his art as less political, and certainly his rendering of lynching in poetry does not aestheticize it in any way. One of the crucial aspects of this poem, in fact, is that McKay refuses to use any similes or metaphors, making sure his language does not sanitize, mitigate, or explain away the brutal facts of the lynching.
While the opening lines clearly establish a comparison between the lynched victim and Christ on the cross, McKay soon demonstrates that the comparison does not hold: here the death of an innocent man does not redeem anyone. Indeed, in McKay's poem the very fact of lynching means that even Christ's death has not redeemed "the awful sin," a failure which the poem emphasizes formally with the imperfect rhyme on heaven/unforgiven. Curiously, McKay does not capitalize "father," and the description of going back to God that the poem provides is not at all comforting or justificatory. For here God chooses—or at least does not stop—the "cruelest" death for his son, and the comma that separates the word “father” from “pain” suggests a fundamental separation from the victim's suffering. By confining the poem's explicitly religious words to only this first stanza, McKay ultimately emphasizes God's absence in the scene of the lynching more than his presence, particularly after the second quatrain when the poem's attention turns towards the lynchers. Tucked away in the poem's first envelope stanza, any notions of salvation or redemption are denied to the white spectators, and McKay roundly condemns a culture that, while ostensibly Christian, can perpetuate such inhuman violence.
