Frederick Douglass

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1947

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Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

History and Hope

Robert Hayden was a career academic, a classroom philosopher who, unlike the more militant voices in his generation of Black artists, tended to take a broader view of history. History, for Hayden, was not defined by momentous tipping points, traumatic events that upended history itself and redirected its course by challenging its very logic. Hayden appreciated the processes of history, the longer and quieter evolution of metaphysics, and how history was defined not by challenges and confrontations but rather by the subtle interplay of forces and peoples that inched humanity toward a better world.

Influenced by his enthusiastic embrace of the Baha’i faith with its resplendent vision of humanity’s evolution to its ultimate spiritual oneness, Hayden here argues that history is the very vehicle of hope. He is no “fool.” He understood how in post-war America racism and segregation were not merely social realities but laws, institutionalized discrimination. But he argues that this could not, would not be the status quo.

The poem, however, does not advocate militant confrontation as a vehicle for necessary change. The poem finds in the soaring affirmation of the logic of inevitability a reason to hope. The ignorance of Jim Crow laws, the crude butchery of vigilante justice, the lack of opportunity in the Black community, the denial of education and economic rights to the Black family, the poem assures, cannot withstand the steady evolutionary energy of righteous and moral history itself. Freedom, at once beautiful and terrifying, will finally belong to everyone. As an academic, Hayden is not particularly interested in the nuts and bolts of how but rather is content to offer this vision of an America where finally none is lonely, outcast, or hunted. The poem, then, is more a vision than a blueprint, more a dream than a plan.

Freedom as a Necessity

Within the nearly 350 years of the American experiment, the term “freedom” has become a critical element in America’s self-perception. The poem argues that given the national fixation on the word, “freedom” has come to mean two entirely different things. To those who routinely enjoy freedom—who vote, who live where they want to live, who own property, who attend schools, who have opportunities to earn their way to financial security, who marry and have families, who eat in restaurants they choose—freedom is a “beautiful” thing. But for those who, back to the rhetoric of Douglass himself, are routinely denied such freedoms, the word takes a menacing connotation. For them, freedom is a “terrible” thing (Line 2), available to them only theoretically, a premise as tantalizing as it is demoralizing. Freedom, those denied are told, is the condition of being an American, a word that should not be qualified here.

The poem argues that freedom is a necessity, as much an element of an individual’s character as their intellect and their biological functions. When—not if—that reality is embraced by the American experiment, skepticism, anger, and impatience all become the bugaboos of tiny minds. History will affirm that the human mind, the human spirit requires freedom to function. Like our lungs, like our muscle reflex system, and like our very heartbeat, each a critical function that seldom merits any attention because we take their necessary functions as given, someday, someway (Hayden is not particularly drawn to the specifics, trusting rather in the evolutionary process itself) freedom itself will be as taken for granted as the lungs and the heart. Imagine, Hayden’s poem argues, an America where being free is a starting point and not the end point of activism, imagine the America in which this premise might be conceived and realized.

The Importance of Activism

It is perhaps ironic that Robert Hayden would select as subject for his sonnet Frederick Douglass, a self-emancipated man turned abolitionist who fought in the two decades leading up to the Civil War to end what he believed was the moral abomination of slavery. Few figures in the more than century-long struggle by Black people to achieve civil equality and economic opportunity recall the figure of Robert Hayden less than Frederick Douglass does.

Hayden, as a poet, was uncomfortable with the assumption that his verse must serve a political agenda because he was a Black poet in mid-century America, or that poetry itself was a tool for social activism. Under the mentorship of W. H. Auden, Hayden took as his model the Irish mystic poet William Butler Yeats, who, like Hayden, struggled with his identity and his faith that poetry served a greater end than activism, although Yeats would pen some of the most passionate paeons to the Irish character and the Irish spirit.

Similarly, Hayden elects to celebrate a figure from Black history whose belief system ran counter to his own but whose activism Hayden appreciates. Douglass dared to re-envision the forces of history that for the academic Hayden were more fascinating than they were fixable. Hayden cannot condemn activists, despite how often history reveals their actions are precipitous, ill-conceived, or doomed. After all, the premise of Hayden’s poem—racial harmony—indirectly reveals that racism still thrives after Douglass’s activism. Hayden learns what Yeats learned before him: Activists need poets to give their rebellion dignity; poets need activists to give their poems purpose.