Words in the Mourning Time: Poems

by Robert Hayden

Book by Hayden, Robert Earl

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published June 1, 1970

About the author

Robert Hayden was an American poet, essayist, educator. He was appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1976.

Hayden was elected to the American Academy of Poets in 1975. From 1976 - 1978, Hayden was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the first African American holder of that post), the position which in 1985 became the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Hayden's most famous and most anthologized poem is Those Winter Sundays[citation needed], which deals with the memory of fatherly love and loneliness.

Other famed poems include The Whipping (which is about a small boy being severely punished for some undetermined offense), Middle Passage (inspired by the events surrounding the United States v. The Amistad affair), Runagate, Runagate, and Frederick Douglass.

Hayden’s influences included Wylie, Cullen, Dunbar, Hughes, Bontemps, Keats, Auden and Yeats. Hayden’s work often addressed the plight of African Americans, usually using his former home of Paradise Valley slum as a backdrop, as he does in the poem Heart-Shape in the Dust. Hayden’s work made ready use of black vernacular and folk speech. Hayden wrote political poetry as well, including a sequence on the Vietnam War.

On the first poem of the sequence, he said, “I was trying to convey the idea that the horrors of the war became a kind of presence, and they were with you in the most personal and intimate activity, having your meals and so on. Everything was touched by the horror and the brutality and criminality of war. I feel that's one of the best of the poems.

Reviews

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moving poetry “as the news from Selma and Saigon / poisons the air like fallout” (from “Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’”)

“Gold brooms had swept
the mist away, and
the island air was clear.”
From “Kodachromes of the Island, I”

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well my review was deleted, so here’s my best recreation.

This collection focuses heavily on the Vietnam war, being so far from that time period it was very informative and I could feel the raw emotions of the time.
“Mystery Boy Looks for Kin in Nashville,” “Zeus over Redeye,””Unidentified Flying Object,” “Monet’s ‘Waterlillies’,” and “Words in the Mourning Time,” were my favorites.

“We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.”

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

...this mus of been a real nice place befor the fighting uglied it all up...
from "The Dream (1863)

Struggles in the pit. I have come back
to tell thee of struggles in the pit.
Perhaps is dying.
Free of pain, my own death still
a theorem to be proved.
Allah'u'Abha. O Healing Spirit,
Thy nearness our forgiving cure.
from "The Broken Dark"

And some are hinting what I,
for one--well, never mind.
The talk is getting mean.
from "Unidentified Flying Object

Oh, what a world we make,
oppressor and oppressed.

Our world--
this violent ghetto, slum
of the spirit raging against itself.

We hate kill destroy
in the name of human good
our killing and our hate destroy.
from "Words in the Mourning Time"

Robert Hayden's second collection of poetry, Words in the Mourning Time, continues the excellent work he started in his initial foray. If anything, now his verse is simultaneously more specific and universal than before. Hayden's poems are sermons we should all ponder and reflect upon.

Excellent poetry--the profound, provocative kind we still need to heed today as everyone needed to heed it in the late 1960s. Highly recommended.

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.
"A Plague of Starlings (Fisk Campus)

[Abbas · Rating 5 out of 5]

We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us.

Reclaim now, now renew the vision of
a human world where godliness
is possible and man
is neither gook nigger honkey wop nor kike

but man

permitted to be man.

-Hayden, Words in Morning Time (1970)

The first African American poet laureate of the United States, Robert Hayden transcended efforts to boxed him in as a representative of his race -a controversial path which set him apart from his African American poet contemporaries. With his sensitivity, depth, and perception, Hayden’s significance in world literature may increase with the passage of time. This short collection reflects on themes including the deaths of Malcom X, MLK, and Robert Kennedy, the Vietnam war, America, hardships, hope, the oneness of humanity, and spiritual dynamics at play in history, society.

[Heath · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first heard Hayden referenced in this brilliant Colbert bit: https://youtu.be/pUaWDqDOWPk