Ivan Mendoza

Professor Blakelock
UH 2010-02
September 23, 2015
If We Must Die by Claude McKay
If we must dielet it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must dieoh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
In the first eight lines of this sonnet by McKay, there is a distinct rhyming matter. The
pattern goes ABABCDCD. Claude also starts the beginning of lines one and four the same with
If we must die. This poem has the metrical foot of the iambic pentameter. There seems to not
be alliteration, although the phrase, Making their mock could be considered an instance. There
are some liquid sounds Mckay uses such as, Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot. Notice
that this phrase demonstrates how the hunters push the men into an unsatisfying position, as
water is often squeezed into a bottle rather than flowing freely. For the context of the poem, it
was necessary that McKay use hard sounds. The poem conveyed honor, warfare and death.
Words such as accursed and constrained exhibit hard sounds in this poem. The images are
very strong because of the message the author is trying to convey. He describes blood as
precious. He describes the enemy as mad and hungry dogs. All the images center on that
idea of honor and not dying without a fight, which leads to a sense of purpose in ones life.
The Sugar Hill Gang Rappers Delight
I said a hip hop,
Hippie to the hippie,
The hip, hip a hop, and you don't stop, a rock it
To the bang bang boogie, say, up jump the boogie,
To the rhythm of the boogie, the beat.
Now, what you hear is not a test - I'm rappin' to the beat,
And me, the groove, and my friends are gonna try to move your feet.
This song does not just invoke thought, but it raises spirits and causes dancing. There is a
lot of alliteration with words starting with the letters b and h. The listener is able to feel the
words boogie and hippie especially when sung which are cases of onomatopoeia. The artist
also uses rhyme towards the end of this stanza, and the entire song has a liquid feel because it
just flows from word to word. There are a lot of stressed words such as hip and bang. This
relates to Wallace Stevens in that the reader has to use his imagination and feel the lyric.