Robert Hayden grew up in the area of Detroit known as Paradise Valley, raised from his birth in 1913 by stern foster parents he nevertheless considered his true family. Hayden, plagued by poor eyesight, could not play regularly with his peers, and his unusually large glasses made him an object of ridicule. He developed an early fondness for literature and the movies, both as intellectual sustenance and as an escape from the abject poverty of his surroundings.
Hayden earned his bachelor’s degree from Detroit City College (now Wayne State University), majoring in Spanish and participating in local dramatic productions. After graduation he conducted extensive research on African American folk history at the Schomburg Center in New York City. This research would filter through Hayden’s imagination to become the material for poems such as “Middle Passage.”
Hayden returned to his home state to begin his graduate study under W. H. Auden at the University of Michigan. He considered Auden’s influence a turning point in his career as a writer: he often remarked that, aside from the library, Auden was his only mentor. It was Auden whom he credited with fostering the precise and layered technique, as well as the strenuous discipline, of his best work.
While at Michigan, Hayden twice won the Hopwood Award for poetry. In 1936 he joined the Federal Writers’ Project and researched local African American folklore and the history of the Underground Railroad in Michigan. In 1940 he released a volume of verse entitled Heart-Shape in the Dust, which he would later disavow as the work of an apprentice.
From 1946 to 1969 Hayden taught at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, finding little time to write consistently. However, in 1962 he published his Ballad of Remembrance, which includes his Hopwood Award–winning poems, and in the following years he would publish Selected Poems (1966), Words in the Mourning Time (1970), Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems (1975), and American Journal (1978, 1980).
In 1970 Hayden joined the English faculty at the University of Michigan, the first African American so appointed. Six years later he was named consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress—the position that was to become the nation’s poet laureateship. Hayden wore these distinctions with his noted reserve, preferring to think of himself as an artist before a public figure.
Hayden’s faith in Baha’i, begun in 1967, became a major ordering principle of both his life and his work, and he served for many years as editor of the Baha’i journal WorldOrder.
With his consistently high level of accomplishment and his breadth of concern—from the historical narrative of poems like “Middle Passage” and “Runagate, Runagate,” to the personal and existential musings of brief lyrics like “A Plague of Starlings” and “Ice Storm”—Hayden extended the boundaries of subject matter for African American poets. The careers of Michael Harper, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carl Phillips, and Elizabeth Alexander are hard to imagine without Hayden’s example. By the time of his death in 1980, Hayden had amassed a nearly flawless collection of poems regarded as among the finest by an American of this century.
Unable to sleep, or pray, I stand
by the window looking out
at moonstruck trees a December storm
has bowed with ice.
Maple and mountain ash bend
under its glassy weight,
their cracked branches falling upon
the frozen snow.
The trees themselves, as in winters past,
will survive their burdening,
broken thrive. And am I less to You,
my God, than they?
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
(Fisk Campus)
Evenings I hear
the workmen fire
into the stiff
magnolia leaves,
routing the starlings
gathered noisy and
befouling there.
Their scissoring
terror like glass
coins spilling breaking
the birds explode
into mica sky
to ground rigid
in clench of cold.
The spared return,
when the guns are through,
to the spoiled trees
like choiceless poor
to a dangerous
dwelling place,
chitter and quarrel
in the piercing dark
above the killed.
Mornings, I pick
my way past death’s
black droppings:
on campus lawns
and streets
the troublesome
starlings
frost-salted lie,
troublesome still.
And if not careful
I shall tread
upon carcasses
carcasses when I
go mornings now
to lecture on
what Socrates,
the hemlock hour nigh,
told sorrowing
Phaedo and the rest
about the migratory
habits of the soul.
I
October—
its plangency, its glow
as of words in
the poet’s mind,
as of God in
the saint’s.
II
I wept for your mother
in her pain, wept in
my joy when you were
born,
Maia,
that October morning.
We named you
for a star a star-like
poem sang.
I write this
for your birthday
and say I love you
and say October
like the phoenix sings you.
III
This chiming
and tolling
of lion
and phoenix
and chimera
colors.
This huntsman’s
mort for
quarry fleeing
through mirrors
of burning
into deathless
dying.
IV
Rockweight
of surprising snow
crushed
the October trees,
broke
branches that
crashing set
the snow on fire.
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, diastole, 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, this 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.
Because there was a man somewhere in a candystripe silk shirt,
gracile and dangerous as a jaguar and because a woman moaned
for him in sixty-watt gloom and mourned him Faithless Love
Twotiming Love Oh Love Oh Careless Aggravating Love,
She came out on the stage in yards of pearls, emerging like
a favorite scenic view, flashed her golden smile and sang.
Because grey laths began somewhere to show from underneath
torn hurdygurdy lithographs of dollfaced heaven;
and because there were those who feared alarming fists of snow
on the door and those who feared the riot-squad of statistics,
She came out on the stage in ostrich feathers, beaded satin,
and shone that smile on us and sang.
For Herbert Martin
We lay red roses on his grave,
speak sorrowfully of him
as if he were but newly dead
And so it seems to us
this raw spring day, though years
before we two were born he was
a young poet dead.
beguiling as an elder
brother’s antic lore.
Their sad blackface lilt and croon
survive him like
The happy look (subliminal
of victim, dying man)
a summer’s tintypes hold.
The roses flutter in the wind;
we weight their stems
with stones, then drive away.
London, 1773
Dear Obour
Our crossing was without
event. I could not help, at times,
reflecting on that first—my Destined—
voyage long ago (I yet
have some remembrance of its Horrors)
and marvelling at God’s Ways.
Last evening, her Ladyship presented me
to her illustrious Friends.
I scarce could tell them anything
of Africa, though much of Boston
and my hope of Heaven. I read
my latest Elegies to them.
“O Sable Muse!” the Countess cried,
embracing me, when I had done.
I held back tears, as is my wont,
and there were tears in Dear
At supper—I dined apart
like captive Royalty—
the Countess and her Guests promised
signatures affirming me
True Poetess, albeit once a slave.
Indeed, they were most kind, and spoke,
moreover, of presenting me
at Court (I thought of Pocahontas)—
an Honor, to be sure, but one,
I should, no doubt, as Patriot decline.
My health is much improved;
I feel I may, if God so Wills,
entirely recover here.
Idyllic England! Alas, there is
no Eden without its Serpent. Under
the chiming Complaisance I hear him Hiss;
I see his flickering tongue
when foppish would-be Wits
murmur of the Yankee Pedlar
and his Cannibal Mockingbird.
Sister, forgive th’intrusion of
my Sombreness—Nocturnal Mood
I would not share with any save
your trusted Self. Let me disperse,
in closing, such unseemly Gloom
by mention of an Incident
you may, as I, consider Droll:
Today, a little Chimney Sweep,
his face and hands with soot quite Black,
staring hard at me, politely asked:
“Does you, M’lady, sweep chimneys too?”
I was amused, but dear Nathaniel
(ever Solicitous) was not.
I pray the Blessings of our Lord
and Saviour Jesus Christ be yours
Abundantly. In His Name,
Phillis
For Steve and Nancy, Allen and Magda
Always this waking dream of palmtrees,
magic flowers—of sensual joys
like treasures brought up from the sea.
Always this longing, this nostalgia
for tropic islands we
have never known and yet recall.
We look for ease upon these islands named
to honor holiness; in their chromatic
torpor catch our breath.
Scorn greets us with promises of rum,
hostility welcomes us to bargain sales.
We make friends with Flamboyant trees.
Jamaican Cynthie, called alien by dese lazy
islanders—wo’k hahd, treated bad,
oh, mahn, I tellin you. She’s full
of raucous anger. Nevertheless brings gifts of
scarlet hibiscus when she comes to clean,
white fragrant spider-lilies too sometimes.
The roofless walls, the tidy ruins
of sugar mill. More than cane
was crushed. But I am tired today
of history, its patina’d clichés
of endless evil. Flame trees.
The intricate sheen of waters flowing into sun.
on opalescent waves—
and can believe my furies have
abandoned for a time their long pursuit.