Robert Hayden’s poetry is marked by intellectual depth, moral seriousness, and a quiet emotional power that rewards careful reading. He is best known for poems that explore African American history, identity, and ethical responsibility, yet his work consistently reaches beyond racial categories to address universal human concerns. Hayden believed strongly in craft and discipline; his poems are carefully structured, often drawing on traditional forms, while still sounding modern in their psychological insight.
One of Hayden’s most celebrated poems, “Those Winter Sundays,” captures a moment of belated understanding between a son and his father. With simple language and restrained emotion, the poem reveals how love is often expressed through sacrifice rather than words. This ability to suggest profound feeling through understatement is a hallmark of Hayden’s style. In historical poems like “Middle Passage” and “Runagate Runagate,” he confronts the horrors of slavery with complex voices, shifting perspectives, and a strong sense of moral inquiry, refusing to simplify history into easy judgments.
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| Robert hayden |
Hayden rejected being labeled solely as a “Black poet,” insisting instead on being recognized as an American poet. Nevertheless, his work powerfully illuminates the African American experience while engaging with larger questions of memory, justice, faith, and human dignity. Through precision, restraint, and ethical seriousness, Robert Hayden created poetry that is both historically grounded and timeless in its emotional and moral reach.
The Whipping
The old woman across the way
is whipping the boy again
and shouting to the neighborhood
her goodness and his wrongs.
Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,
pleads in dusty zinnias,
while she in spite of crippling fat
pursues and corners him.
She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling
boy till the stick breaks
in her hand. His tears are rainy weather
to woundlike memories:
My head gripped in bony vise
of knees, the writhing struggle
to wrench free, the blows, the fear
worse than blows that hateful
Words could bring, the face that I
no longer knew or loved . . .
Well, it is over now, it is over,
and the boy sobs in his room,
And the woman leans muttering against
a tree, exhausted, purged—
avenged in part for lifelong hidings
she has had to bear.
Those Winter Sundays
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?
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, 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.
Monet's Waterlilies
Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.
Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.
O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.
Full Moon
No longer throne of a goddess to whom we pray,
no longer the bubble house of childhood's
tumbling Mother Goose man,
The emphatic moon ascends—
the brilliant challenger of rocket experts,
the white hope of communications men.
Some I love who are dead
were watchers of the moon and knew its lore;
planted seeds, trimmed their hair,
Pierced their ears for gold hoop earrings
as it waxed or waned.
It shines tonight upon their graves.
And burned in the garden of Gethsemane,
its light made holy by the dazzling tears
with which it mingled.
And spread its radiance on the exile's path
of Him who was The Glorious One,
its light made holy by His holiness.
Already a mooted goal and tomorrow perhaps
an arms base, a livid sector,
the full moon dominates the dark.
The Prisoners
Steel doors – guillotine gates –
of the doorless house closed massively.
We were locked in with loss.
Guards frisked us, marked our wrists,
then let us into the drab Rec Hall –
splotched green walls, high windows barred –
where the dispossessed awaited us.
Hands intimate with knife and pistol,
hands that had cruelly grasped and throttled
clasped ours in welcome. I sensed the plea
of men denied: Believe us human
like yourselves, who but for Grace…
We shared reprieving Hidden Words
revealed by the Godlike imprisoned
One, whose crime was truth.
And I read poems I hoped were true.
It's like you been there, brother, been there,
the scarred young lifer said.
Witch Doctor
I
He dines alone surrounded by reflections
of himself. Then after sleep and benzedrine
descends the Cinquecento stair his magic
wrought from hypochondria of the well-
to-do and nagging deathwish of the poor;
swirls on smiling genuflections of
his liveried chauffeur into a crested
lilac limousine, the cynosure
of mousey neighbors tittering behind
Venetian blinds and half afraid of him
and half admiring his outrageous flair.
II
Meanwhile his mother, priestess in gold lamé,
precedes him to the quondam theater
now Israel Temple of the Highest Alpha,
where the bored, the sick, the alien, the tired
await euphoria. With deadly vigor
she prepares the way for mystery
and lucre. Shouts in blues-contralto, ”He’s
God’s dictaphone of all-redeeming truth.
Oh he’s the holyweight champeen who’s come
to give the knockout lick to your bad luck;
say he’s the holyweight champeen who’s here
to deal a knockout punch to your hard luck.“
III
Reposing on cushions of black leopard skin,
he telephones instructions for a long
slow drive across the park that burgeons now
with spring and sailors. Peers questingly
into the green fountainous twilight, sighs
and turns the gold-plate dial to Music For
Your Dining-Dancing Pleasure. Smoking Egyptian
cigarettes rehearses in his mind
a new device that he must use tonight.
IV
Approaching Israel Temple, mask in place,
he hears ragtime allegros of a ”Song
of Zion“ that becomes when he appears
a hallelujah wave for him to walk.
His mother and a rainbow-surpliced cordon
conduct him choiring to the altar-stage,
and there he kneels and seems to pray before
a lighted Jesus painted sealskin-brown.
Then with a glittering flourish he arises,
turns, gracefully extends his draperied arms:
“Israelites, true Jews, O found lost tribe
of Israel, receive my blessing now.
Selah, selah.” He feels them yearn toward him
as toward a lover, exults before the image
of himself their trust gives back. Stands as though
in meditation, letting their eyes caress
his garments jewelled and chatoyant, cut
to fall, to flow from his tall figure
dramatically just so. Then all at once
he sways, quivers, gesticulates as if
to ward off blows or kisses, and when he speaks
again he utters wildering vocables,
hypnotic no-words planned (and never failing)
to enmesh his flock in theopathic tension.
Cries of eudaemonic pain attest
his artistry. Behind the mask he smiles.
And now in subtly altering light he chants
and sinuously trembles, chants and trembles
while convulsive energies of eager faith
surcharge the theater with power of
their own, a power he has counted on
and for a space allows to carry him.
Dishevelled antiphons proclaim the moment
his followers all day have hungered for,
but which is his alone.
He signals: tambourines begin, frenetic
drumbeat and glissando. He dances from the altar,
robes hissing, flaring, shimmering; down aisles
where mantled guardsmen intercept wild hands
that arduously strain to clutch his vestments,
he dances, dances, ensorcelled and aloof,
the fervid juba of God as lover, healer,
conjurer. And of himself as God.
Double Feature
At Dunbar, Castle or Arcade
we rode with the exotic sheik
through deserts of erotic flowers;
held in the siren madonna's arms
were safe from the bill-collector's power.
Forgave the rats and roaches we
could not defeat, beguiled by jazzbo
strutting of a mouse. And when
the Swell Guy, roused to noblest wrath
shot down all those weakéd men,
Oh how we cheered to see the good we were
destroy the bad we'd never be.
What mattered then the false, the true
at Dunbar, Castle or Arcade,
where we were other for an hour or two?
