If We Must Die by: Claude Mckay (Analysis Paper)

Second, striking similes are used throughout the whole poem. The speaker does not content himself with using age-old phrases or comparisons. His similes are unique and gripping. "Like old beggars under sacks," "like a man in fire or lime," and "like a devil's sick of sin," help to add vivid mental pictures to the poem. The soldier's uniforms are ripped and threadbare from all the fighting, and they are so exhausted that they bend over as they walk. The man that breathed the mustard gas is in such incredible pain that all he can do is jerk about as if he were on fire. After a while, the gas causes his face to sag until he resembles something from the horrors of hell. The speaker's similes are ones that cause the reader to stop and just think about what is being described

Clearly provocative and even chilling, “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay stirs deep and powerful emotions in any who reads it. A poem inspired by violent race riots, it serves as a motivating anthem representative of an entire culture. Graphic and full of vengeance this poem is demanding action, not telling a story. McKay utilizes imagery to its fullest extent creating an end result which any man or woman, black or white, who has ever felt the hard and hateful hand of oppression can relate to.

Death is a topic that unites all of humanity. While it can be uncomfortable to think about, confronting death in unavoidable. “Dying” addresses that discomfort and universal unwillingness to consider the inevitability of death. Pinsky’s use of imagery, symbolism, and tone create a poetic experience that is like death, something every reader can relate to. In “Dying,” Pinsky describes how people are oblivious and almost uncaring when it comes to the thought of death. Pinsky is trying to convince the reader that they shouldn’t ignore the concept of death because life is shorter than it seems.

Each individual has a unique way of coping with death, and this is evident throughout Christina Rossetti’s, “Remember” and W. H. Auden’s “Stop all of the Clocks”.

Chuck Palahniuk once said, “The first step to eternal life, is you have to die.” In William Cullen Bryant’s poem “Thanatopsis”, he does not mention eternal life or anything religious, but speaks about death. He tells his readers that death is a natural thing and they should not worry about it. William Cullen Bryant, in his poem “Thanatopsis”, portrays a comforting view of death. Throughout the poem, Bryant encourages his readers by explaining that in death they are not alone, that death, like life, is a natural process, and that they will be among some of the finest people who walked the earth.

Dying slowly as a worthless person or even a “hog” for something that never happened, can cause others to make more of this death. The poem, “If We Must Die” and the movie A Lesson Before Dying are very similar and point out how unfair it is to die in such a horrid way. In the movie, a man was wrongfully accused of murder and he was sentenced to death, however citizens work together to make him a “man” before death. The poem simply shows that some people really want to die with meaning. The main similarities in both these stories deal with how death should be done or even how a person should be considered before death.

The author uses imagery in the poem to enable the reader to see what the speaker sees. For example, in lines 4-11 the speaker describes to us the

Para-rhymes, in Owen’s poetry, generate a sense of incompleteness while creating a pessimistic, gloomy effect to give an impression of sombreness. Strong rhyming schemes are often interrupted unexpectedly with a para-rhyme to incorporate doubt to every aspect of this Great War. Who are the real villains and why are hundreds of thousands of lives being wasted in a war with no meaning? In ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, the consistent sonnet rhyming scheme is disturbed by a half rhyme, “guns … orisons”, to show how the soldiers all died alone with only the weapons that killed them by their side, and a visual rhyme, “all … pall” to indicate that the reality of war is entirely the opposite to what it seems - no glory, no joy and no heroism, but only death and destruction. Owen occasionally works with this technique in a reverse approach to create similar thought. For instance, the assonance, consonance and half rhyme based poem, ‘The Last Laugh’, contains an unforeseen full rhyme, “moaned … groaned”, to emphasise that nothing is ever fixed in war except the ghastly fact that the weapons are the true winners. Different forms of Para rhymes often work together with common schemes to ably bring out the main ideas of Owen’s poetry.

By biological logic, we human beings will face death sooner or later in our life and death has its very own ways to approach us - a sudden deadly strike, a critical sickness, a tragic accident, a prolonged endurance of brutal treatment, or just an aging biological end. To deal with the prospect of death come different passive or active reactions; some may be scared and anxious to see death, some try to run away from it, and some by their own choice make death come faster. But Viktor Frankl, through his work Man’s Search for Meaning, and Bryan Doyle; in his essay “His Last Game” show us choices to confront the death, bring it to our deepest feelings, meaningful satisfaction. To me, the spirit of the prisoners at deadly concentration camps, Frankl’s Logotherapy theory of “. . . striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.” (99), as well as the calmness of Doyle’s brother on his last ride, like an awaken bell, remind us of how precious life is, how we should find the significance in every act of living, determine to live a meaningful life at any circumstances; hence, when death comes, we can accept it without anxiety nor regrets.

Regardless of race, caste, religion, or age, every human has wondered about the one fact of life that unifies us all: What is death? Both poems, “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” by Margaret Atwood and “Because I could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson share a common subject of death. Using figurative language, both poems illustrate distinct takes on a similar topic.

Mckay fashions his poem the intent to specifically target each individual reader regardless of who they are, to tap into their revolutionary spirit. Mckay starts the poem with signifying that he and the reader are stuck together, surrounded by their enemy, “While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,”(3). Using careful diction, Mckay chose the word “round” to conjure up the image of the speaker and reader being comrades stuck in the same violent situation, where they are cornered forcefully by a group of aggressive, crazy people, creating a chance for them to connect and relate with each other by bonding over the feeling of struggling, versus divided on whatever stance they take on a subject. By using a second person point of view to narrate

Death is an important theme in Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Masque of the Red Death”.

Poems are typically written in a distinctive way to convey a specific message to the reader. The words or diction construct a poem by depicting ideas, feelings, setting, and characters. Therefore, a poet must chose his/her words with great care to create the appropriate message and to allow the reader to comprehend the general meaning. Thomas Hardy composed The Man He Killed, a poem demonstrating the effect war has upon soldiers and how war changes friend into a foe. The informal diction used by Hardy adds to the general meaning and impact of the poem. Idiom, specific and concrete words, and rhyming are all combined to form the diction of the poem, which enhance the

“Death be not proud” by John Donne personifies death, as its title aptly prescribes. Giving death human traits allows the writer to blast him with colorful images full of sarcasm and a tone of defiance. The ultimate message of the author provokes the human soul to resist the fear of death.

Poetry is an art form that has often been highly regarded. It brings together some of the most complex forms of writing in the English language. Two poems that focus on the same topic may sometimes, have completely different views and provide perspectives that may not have been considered by the other. Two of these Poems are Let Me Die A Youngman’s Death by Roger McGough and On Death by Anne Killigrew. The former poem by Roger McGough talks of how the speaker does not wish to die the peaceful death of an elderly person but rather the chaotic death of a young man. In death is nothing at all the speaker proposes that all should be as happy as before his death, and not view it in such a negative and secretive light.