“If We Must Die,” A Poem We All Should Know

Heather Cox Richardson

Claude McKay. Courtesy of the
Beinecke Library, Yale University.

Recently, I found myself telling history students which poems they must know as part of their rock-bottom basic understanding of American history. There is Anne Bradstreet’s “Epitaph for her Mother," exploring what it meant to be a good woman in colonial America; Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in theDooryard Bloom’d," linking Lincoln’s assassination to the natural world; and Claude McKay’s 1919 “If We Must Die."
  

If we must die—let 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 die—oh, 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!

O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!