Third Quatrain and Final Couplet: "O, kinsmen" to "but fighting back"
Summary
The third quatrain and final couplet begin with affirmations of the speaker and his allies' masculinity, and McKay's use of "kinsmen" in particular binds the men together as brothers. After the first two quatrains' appeals to honor and nobility, here the speaker makes a more direct call for resistance, and McKay now begins to use the language of violence ("fighting," "deathblow") in reference to the "us" and not just the "them." The speaker clearly and unequivocally acknowledges the odds against them, noting that they are "far outnumbered," yet he still tries to rally them against the "common foe," encouraging them to "deal one death-blow" in response to the "thousand blows" they suffer. The final couplet drops the poem's conditional language entirely, stating that they will face their foe, and while the speaker returns to an image of constraint ("pressed"), here they are not hunted and surrounded but "fighting back."
Analysis
Like the quatrain before it, the third quatrain uses consciously antiquated diction to give a classical, elevated feel to the language, and McKay further develops this elevated, even elegiac, effect through the heavy repetition of the long "o" sound (O, foe, though, show, blows, open, etc.). As the speaker shifts towards explaining what they must do, words like "not" drop out of the poem, and new words like "meet" and "face" begin to appear. These latter terms are particularly important, suggesting traditional conceptions of face-to-face combat and heroism in battle in keeping with the poem's tone. This idea of proving their mettle also appears in "let us show us brave," where the word "show" suggests that the eyes of the world are upon them and introducing the concept of performance into the speaker's appeal. While they may have nothing before them but "the open grave"—indeed, the speaker's repeated use of "though" continually acknowledges just how bad things are—he proclaims the necessity of demonstrating their bravery and fighting back nonetheless.
The poem's final couplet begins with "like men," explicitly contrasting with both the earlier "like hogs" and the "cowardly" demeanor of the "pack" of enemies. Here the speaker further implies that "manliness" is as much a state to be achieved through valorous actions as a given fact of being male, and he mobilizes this traditional conception of masculinity to affirm his "kinsmen's" sense of self and inspire them to active resistance. In these final lines, the poem's long "O" sounds disappear in favor of harsher sounds like "rd" and "ck"; this shifts the focus from the elevated notions of nobility and a warrior's death to a more active conception of fighting, which is also reflected in the present participle forms in the final line (dying, fighting). These verbs insert us into the actions the speaker describes, completing the transformation from the more open-ended "if" and "let" at the beginning of the sonnet to the unambiguous assertions of death (dying) and combat (fighting) at the end.
