Robert Hayden’s style and talent can best
be seen in the title poem of his prize winning
book, ‘‘A Ballad of Remembrance.’’ The situa-
tion of the poem is confusing at first until the
reader puzzles out that the speaker is a North-
ern black who has been suddenly plunged into
the unnerving world of the Deep South city of
New Orleans.
... As well as being a poem of striking and
effective language and sound, ‘‘A Ballad of
Remembrance’’ is a poem that confronts the
choices that history has forced on most Black
Americans today (‘‘Accommodate... Love...
Hate’’). Hayden chooses the way of love, although
not the way of the chiming saints, his being a
human love that saves, one person for another,
as the way out of the dilemma America has created
for him.
Some of Hayden’s finest poems are those
concerning Afro-American history: ‘‘Middle Pas-
sage,’’‘‘The Ballad of Nat Turner,’’ and ‘‘Runa-
gate, Runagate,’’ the title a corruption of the
wordrenegade—the runaway slave. In the latter
poem we see the figure of Harriet Tubman, more
vividly than in hundreds of pages by historians:
And this was the way of it, brethren brethren,
way we journeyed from Can’t to Can.
Moon so bright and no place to hide,
the cry up and the patterollers riding,
hound dogs belling in bladed air.
And fear starts a-murbling, Never make it,
we’ll never make it.Hush that now,
and she’s turned upon us, levelled pistol
glinting in the moonlight:
Dead folks can’t jaybird-talk, she says;
you keep on going now or die, she says.
‘‘Middle Passage’’ is Hayden’s most ambi-
tious poem and possibly his best. The title not
only refers to the historical route of the slave ships
but also to a middle passage in life, a place for a
sea-change, a transformation. There are three
historical speakers in the poem—the first a mem-
ber of a crew troubled by the terrible treatment of
the slaves, the second a tough slaver describing
the purchase of the Africans... and third, a self-
righteous member ofThe Amistadrecounting the
revolt led by the slave Cinquez.
The poem is controlled, however, by a fourth
voice, out of time, who through a series of refrain-
like passages gives us the meaning of the poem.
Alluding ironically to The Tempest,Hayden
shows the economic significance of ‘‘black gold.’’
Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,
of his bones New England pews are made,
those are altar lights that were his eyes.
But through this ‘‘Voyage through death,/
voyage whose chartings are unlove’’ come other
transformations, most significantly that of Cin-
quez, ‘‘the black prince.’’ He becomes in his revolt
a ‘‘deathless primaveral image/life that transfig-
ures many lives.’’ ‘‘Middle Passage’’ is a searing
recreation of the horrors of the slave trade, one
that plunges into the darkest and deepest mean-
ings of history—through the ‘‘Voyage through
death/to life upon these shores.’’
In the 1970 volumeWords in the Mourning
TimeHayden attempts to portray recent history.
There are poems about the life and death of Mal-
colm X, Vietnam, the assassinations of Robert
Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but the events
often seem to overwhelm his craft. There are effec-
tive poems in the book but none as memorable as
the best poems inSelected Poems. They seem thin-
ner, more hesitant than the earlier work as if the
mourning has become too great for the words.
The final poem of Hayden’sSelected Poems
is a masterful rolling piece of rhetoric that illus-
trates again his major themes of pain and hope. It
is a poem both reminiscent of and in marked
contrast with LeRoi Jones’s more recent ‘‘A
Poem for Black Hearts’’ about Malcolm X. The
contrast might help in part to account for Jones’s
fame and Hayden’s relative obscurity. Hayden’s
poem is entitled ‘‘Frederick Douglass.’’
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this
liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, dia-
stole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it
is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave,
the Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’
rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of
bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful
thing.Runagate Runagate