Renaissance sonnets" and the "inaugural address" of the Renaissance. Wallace Thurman considered the poem as embodying the essence of the New Negro movement as it was not aimed at arousing sympathy, but rather consisted of self-assertion. The scholar Jean Wagner cited the poem as inspirational to people experiencing persecution, writing that “[a]long with the will to resistance of black Americans that it expresses it voices also the will of oppressed people of every age who, whatever their race and wherever their region, are fighting with their backs against the wall to win their freedom.” Tonya Foster wrote that McKay's poem turned those who were persecuted into heroes and described it as a "call to arms for workers": by using "we" repeatedly, McKay extends his poem to whoever the poem reaches, and it is a nonspecific poemthere are no phrases tying it to a specific group or raceand can apply to any group under attack by "monsters we defy". Structure McKay wrote the poem as a Shakespearean sonnet, using an ABABCDCDEFEF rhyming pattern across three quatrains and ending with a "perfectly rhymed" couplet. The poem begins with eight lines written as conditional sentences (if/then) centered on "the inevitable death" of the subject. The next six lines are a separate section. By having three lines that are broken without any punctuation (three, six, and seven), McKay creates a sense of "immediacy, urgency". The sestet, or final six lines, provides a calmer and "controlled" resolution each line ends with punctuation. The final line of the poem has two caesuras, or breaks in the phrase. The scholar Robert A. Lee provided a close reading of the poem in CLA Journal. He noted that "If We Must Die" is structured to develop with imagery. It begins the subject being described as "hogs" who are "hunted" and "penned" by "animals". In the second quatrain, the animals have become "monsters" and the hogs are humanized with "precious" blood and the ability to "defy" the monsters. Here, instead of the hogs being penned, the monsters have been "constrained". In the third, the hogs have developed to "kinsmen" while the dogs are "common". The poem ends with a couplet where the subject is "men" and the monsters are a "murderous, cowardly pack". Those who are oppressed continue to fight although they realize they "must die". Legacy Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican member of the United States Senate from Massachusetts,