![]() ![]() Hayden’s decision to delay the release of that information-the identification of the poem’s speaker-as well as his deployment of the conditional sentence as the poem opens, allows the poem, temporally, to be positioned in the past, present, and future at once. The title initially suggests that perhaps “Fredrick Douglass” is a persona poem, which could certainly be reinforced by the poem’s opening line: “When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty…” However, reading on, we discover at line seven that, “this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro,” this speaker is, in fact, not Douglass but some other contemporary, quite likely Hayden himself. Hayden’s concern is the course of history itself-what our country has promised, and how those promises have yet to be fully realized.įrom its very title and onward, “Fredrick Douglass” establishes and subverts its reader’s expectations. ![]() It is a poem that, through Hayden’s careful and deliberate craft decisions, enacts another waiting, the poem about much more than Douglass the individual. “But some of us are aware of it as a long, tortuous, and often bloody process of becoming.” Hayden’s 1947 poem “Frederick Douglass,” like so much of his work, is haunted by the ghosts of said “bloody process,” Fredrick Douglass himself among them. “The past is for most Americans, unfortunately, rather meaningless,” the poet Robert Hayden said in 1976. Waiting for a student to return an email. I am waiting for water to boil to steep a sachet of tea. Here I am, ruminating on the poetics of home in the African American Diaspora, and there are those who, across the country, have been unemployed for months, whose homes are in jeopardy, who need-are waiting for-relief, though hardly the kind of relief a reader experiences after the final lines of a poem. And there is so much to make sense of-with the nation reeling from the impact of a global pandemic, our national death toll rising, a dearth of responsible federal leadership or direction, and a country divided over the legacy of its own brutal past. They help us make sense of the world and how to emotionally orient and navigate ourselves within. It is during times of uncertainty and fear that one, such as myself, might turn to poetry, which Robert Frost has famous described as “a momentary stay against confusion.” Poems reveal the world to us, or reveal ourselves in the world they guide us toward surprise, discovery, and in the best cases, wisdom, delight. I am waiting, as we have begun trying, to find out if my wife is pregnant, and if so, how that might be affected by word of who will be elected to the executive branch for the next four years. I am waiting on the results of the Coronavirus test I took on campus less than 36 hours ago. I am waiting for word as to who will be elected to the executive branch for the next four years as well as who will serve in Congress. In the deep dark of night, I am watching the electoral map take on weightier shades of blue and red. Which is to say, I, much like the country at large, am waiting. It is two days after the presidential election as I sit at my desk and turn my attention to this essay. This Beautiful, Needful Thing: On the Poetics of Home in the African American Diaspora ![]()
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