Concluding sestet (third quatrain and final couplet): "Day dawned" to "in fiendish glee."
Summary
The poem's final section describes the morning after the lynching when the "mixed crowds" come to view the victim's body. In the third quatrain McKay uses a number of visual words ("view," "look, "eyes") to indicate that racialized violence and death have here been made into a spectacle, and indeed any sense of the victim as a human being and an individual disappears as he becomes objectified as a "char," "body," and "thing." As we move into the last 4 lines, McKay narrows the focus to even further to describe a crowd of women "throng[ing] to look" and a group of "little lads" who dance around the corpse. While the speaker uses words of horror ("dreadful," "ghastly") in his description, he also shows that the white onlookers do not see it that way—the women are "steely" and the children filled with "glee." Ending the poem with a description of the children as "fiendish" dancers, McKay shows that one generation of "lynchers" has spawned another, suggesting that the event functions as a sort of initiation ritual that will ensure the continuity of lynching for years to come.
Analysis
"The Lynching" as a whole, and this final section in particular, subverts longstanding tropes and deviate from poetic norms—even those of McKay himself—in several important ways. For one thing, the poem has a complete lack of exclamation points—somewhat unusual for a McKay sonnet—which is clearly meant to reflect the grave and somber nature of the content. Secondly, in describing playful little children and blue-eyed women, McKay plays on longstanding notions that associate these images with love, purity, innocence, and hope; here, however, he also subverts them to show that the children are actually like little demons and the women are so cruelly indifferent that they are literally separated from any “sorrow” by the poem’s line break: “the women thronged to look, but never a one / Showed sorrow." If the final word of the poem—"glee"—seems out of place as the only happy word in the entire sonnet, McKay's sonic elements (the be/glee rhyme and the assonance in "fiendish glee") actually make it feel right at home, indicating that this perverse “glee” is in complete harmony with the larger culture of racism and violence.
Indeed, the most salient takeaway from the poem's finale is precisely that this culture will continue, that the "new day" described after the volta does not indicate a new beginning but rather a continuing cycle of violence. If McKay's earlier allusion to the North Star (a coordinate escaped slaves could use to find their way north) reminds us that the present of his poem emerges directly out of the legacy of slavery itself, then McKay's decision to end the poem on the "fiendish" embodiment of the next generation suggests that this legacy will carry on far beyond the present of the poem. When McKay writes of the "little lads, lynchers that were to be," his "l" alliteration inextricably links the lads to their future as "lynchers," and the phrasing “were to be” doubles down on “to be” verbs to imply that these children's very existence is tied up with the fact of lynching. While these final lines thus follow the "Shakespearean" form by ending on a rhyming couplet, McKay's use of the concluding couplet offers not any form of "resolution" but only an ironic conclusion suggesting that the atrocities of racism and violence are fundamental aspects of U.S. culture.
