Modern American Poetry

(^398) Anita Patterson
engaged social criticism. Instead of using words that deceive us into seeing
only their “transparency” and make us believe that we are taking an
unmediated look through a windowpane to a world outside the poem,
Hughes offers historical knowledge by directing our attention to his careful
arrangement of words on the page. His style often dramatizes how language
shapes the poem’s social perspectives.
“Flight,” which first appeared in the June 1930 issue of Opportunity,
demonstrates how Hughes’s realist poetics meets modernist formal
expectations. The poem is set in a swamp, during the postemancipation
period: a black man, accused of raping a white woman, is trying to escape
from a lynch mob. The pursuit of hounds recalls the history of slavery and
suggests that rituals of racial violence in the South continued, and even
escalated, after emancipation. Hughes’s speaker assumes two points of view:
observer and victim. The poem begins by giving the victim, who initially
occupies the same position as the reader, the impossible task of stepping in
mud without leaving tracks:
Plant your toes in the cool swamp mud.
Step and leave no track.
Hurry, sweating runner!
The hounds are at your back.
No I didn’t touch her
White flesh ain’t for me.
Hurry! Black boy, hurry!
They’ll swing you to a tree.^10
In “Flight” Hughes uses a short lyric form to present a splintered
aspect of a reality too vast and horrifying to comprehend in its entirety.
Instead the speaker describes, analyzes, and orders a tragic, swiftly unfolding
moment. The lyric evokes a tension between Hughes’s artistic suspension of
time and the time-bound social realities that are the subject of his poem. But
despite his reliance on the temporal restrictions of the genre, Hughes refuses
to rest content with the familiar consolations of lyric transcendence and
disengagement. Distrustful of such forced integrities and closures, he builds
in a narrative structure that implies a larger, sociohistorical context, giving
disquieting openness to the exigencies that lend the poem shape and
significance.
The reign of terror in the wake of emancipation generated the special