Lesson Plans: Robert Hayden, Full of Grace

"Just a post before I go, to whom it may concern...": anyone remember that song by the reunited CSN? Ye gods and little fishies, what terrible taste I had back in '75! In any case, I'm about to go off-line for a few days, off to California for a family to-do, so this will be my sign off until next Tuesday.

Before I go, a word about Robert Hayden. I taught his Collected Poems three times last year: to sophomore non-majors, to English major upperclassmen, and to graduate students. Everyone loved him, and the more time I spent with his work, the more I did, too. He ought, though, to be taught at the middle and high school level first, perhaps as a substitute for one of those chestnuts like The Great Gatsby or The Scarlet Letter, which are wasted on the young. There's an Online Poetry Classroom lesson plan about Hayden for you to check out here; here are some of my teaching thoughts on one of his poems, too.

An easy way to bring Hayden into the curriculum, if you're teaching Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (and if you're not, you bloody well should be, along with Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which I would be willing to swap for Anne Frank's in American schools) is the unrhymed sonnet "Frederick Douglass."

When I teach "Frederick Douglass," I like to start with a question posed by Howard Hampton, the rock critic, in his memorable review of the forgettable Springsteen CD Tunnel of Love. Hampton led the review by musing on Elvis Presley's "Have you heard the news? / There's good rockin' tonight." Rockin', says Hampton, was of course a code word for dancing, and dancing, as everyone knew, was a code word for sex, and sex, when you thought about it more, was a code word for freedom. The real question, though, is this: what on earth is freedom the code word for? That is one question behind the Hayden poem.

The poem begins as a series of elaborations on a simple core sentence: "When it is finally ours, this man shall be remembered." Each element of that sentence--the "it," the "ours," the "man," and the "remembered"--gets mulled over, worried through. Here is the poem in pieces, with some teaching notes:

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
And terrible thing, needful to man as air,
Useable as earth....

Step one: get them to the OED. Where does the word "freedom" come from? How is it different, in its roots and branches of usage, from "liberty"? Well, "free" goes back, says my OED, to the Old Aryan *priyo-, from the root *pri to love, hence the Sanskrit pri to delight, endear, and the Old English freon to love, whence "Friend." "The primary sense of the adj. is ‘dear’; the Germanic and Celtic sense comes of its having been applied as the distinctive epithet of those members of the household who were connected by ties of kindred with the head, as opposed to the slaves." Liberty develops in the opposite direction: it's from "lber ‘children’, literally the ‘free’ members of the household," and thence into political discourse. Did you know this? I didn't. Hayden does, and the speaker of the poem starts with Freedom, tries to gloss it as liberty, finds that that isn't quite enough, and then moves into the adjectival explanation, what this "freedom" is to us: beautiful, terrible, needful, useable, all of which can be discussed.

Now the poem turns its attention to "ours." What does it mean for it to be "ours"?

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:

Here, along with the ideas to be discussed, especially about freedom being "ours" only when it is part of both head and heart and action, etc., you can do a lot with the speaker--who, after all, has shown that he can switch from political to medical dictions at the turn of a line--and with the way he dances away from the cliche of freedom being "finally won" (the shortest phrase in the poem) into the recognition that such language is, too easily, merely "the gaudy mumbo-jumbo of politicians" (and of course, Hayden knows that "mumbo-jumbo" is an old s slur on African religion, which could also be looked up in the OED).

The poem now shifts to the next part of its core sentence, "this man," and riffs on who "this man" was. Each stage is transformative:

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien...

The first phrase, "this man," calls to mind how central the discourse of manhood--and of mere humanity--turns out to be in the Narrative, a book whose crucial moment comes when Douglass confronts the "slave-breaker," Covey. "You have seen how a man becomes a thing," Douglass says; "now you will see how a thing becomes a man." (Or words to that effect: the chiasmus, though, is key.) "This Douglass" calls up the whole issue of naming, in Douglass and elsewhere; if I knew more about Scottish history, it might speak to me even more.

What, though, of "this former slave, this Negro / beaten to his knees, exiled..."? The more you know the Narrative, the more you see how Hayden is revising it here. Douglass doesn't assert his manhood by being "beaten to his knees" or being "exiled." He becomes a man by fighting back, mano a mano and man to man. To my mind, the phrase "Negro / beaten to his knees" is far more resonant of the nonviolent protests of the Civil Rights movement, eliding Douglass's link (through violent resistance) to other forms of protest and resistance competing with King, et. al., at the time the poem was written.

As for "exiled," it's hard to see how Douglass was ever "exiled" anywhere, really--unless he was always an exile in America, as one of my students asserted. "Exiled," too, thus marks a transformation of Douglass by Hayden--this time into a version, not of Dr. King, but of Ba'haullah, the prophet of the Baha'i faith, a faith whose vision of universal brotherhood (and of America's role in world history) are thus woven into the poem, and back into Douglass's life. The world envisioned by Douglass--"a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien"--thus glosses what "freedom" might actually mean, etymologically, or be a code word for, politically, and it's a very different world from the more individualistic one that Locke and Jefferson likely meant when they wrote of "liberty." Having articulated this vision, the poem says one last thing about Douglass--

this man, superb in love and logic--

which repeats and varies the heart and mind language we found earlier in "systole, diastole" and "brain matter." Now that those threads have been tied up, and problems solved, the poem can go on.

this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreathes of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Here is Hayden at his humblest--and if you know the Horace Ode he's playing off of here (Ode iii.30, "Today I have finished a work outlasting bronze / And the pyramids of ancient royal kings...") and the Shakespeare sonnet that revises the Horace, too (sonnet 55, "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme"), that humility shines through even more clearly. "Statues' rhetoric" looks back to "mumbo-jumbo of politicians," of course, just as "fleshing his dream" is the final twist of the heart / head theme. The real kicker, though, is the repetition and variation of "beautiful / terrible thing" as "beautiful, needful thing." Somehow, over the course of the poem, the fear that this "this freedom, this liberty" is a "terrible" thing (in the sense of terrifying, natch) has been eased, my guess by the vision of a world where none is alien, since liberty might well seem an alienating, isolating thing. In any case, it's a change whose motivation needs to be explained.

Dang! I love this poem, but I'd love for every student I teach to sigh in class and say, "Professor Selinger, do we have to read this one AGAIN? We studied this one in seventh grade!" Someday, someday...

OK--off to pack. More on Hayden in other posts, someday, too.