http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hayden/hayden.htm
Among the modernist poets, Robert Hayden, the first African American Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress – a position now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate – stands out as one who took on the European ideals of intellectualism and formal poetics and blended them with the thematic force of the early African American experience. Nowhere is his accomplishment better illustrated than in his poem "Runagate Runagate" published in 1962. It is a praise-song to the past, a history, a genealogy that connects the slave of the past with the burdened black people of the present, reminding them of their heritage of struggle, resistance and forbearance. From the outset the reader is thrown inside the mind of a runaway slave, stark and realistic. The cadence of the opening lines recreates the driven movement and the fear:
Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness
and the darkness thicketed with the shapes of terror
and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing
and the night cold and the night long and the river
to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning
and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere
morning and keep on going and never turn back
and keep on going
Runagate
Runagate
Runagate (1-11)
As noted earlier, the repetition of key words and phrases is a device common to African orality, folk sermons and spirituals, and in Hayden's hands this device becomes flight incarnate. Hayden uses dialectic phraseology to place the reader in a precise point in the Sasa of the African American. He lifts the reader's spirits as he lifts entire lines directly from the spirituals to provide the communal response:
Many thousands rise and go
many thousands crossing over (12-13)
……
Rise and go or fare you well
No more auction block for me
no more driver's lash for me (18-20)
……
And before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave (30-31)
In the remainder of the poem, Hayden employs another device common to African oral traditions and the spirituals, in which he relates the attributes and deeds of a folk hero. As discussed earlier, the biblical hero portrayed most often in the spirituals was Moses. As time passed, the function served by the heroes in the spirituals expanded beyond that of venerated ancestors to signify freedom fighters like Harriet Tubman, a woman also known as "Black Moses" because she led hundreds of slaves to freedom through the legendary "Underground Railroad":
Rises from their anguish and their power,
Harriet Tubman,
woman of earth, whipscarred,
a summoning, a shining
Mean to be free (37-41)
Then extols the preacher:
And this was the way of it, brethren brethren,
way we journeyed from Can't to Can
Moon so bright and no place to hide,
the cry up and the patterollers riding,
hound dogs belling in bladed air.
And fear starts a-murbling, Never make it,
we'll never make it. Hush that now,
and she's turned upon us, leveled pistol
glinting in the moonlight:
Dead folks can't jaybird-talk, she says;
you keep on going now or die, she says. (42-52)
Hayden continues the use of stunning imagery to place the reader within the dark forest, hiding and waiting with the runaway slaves:
Hoot-owl calling in the ghosted air,
five times calling to the hands in the air.
Shadow of a face in the scary leaves,
shadow of a voice in the talking leaves:
Come ride-a my train (61-65)
Oh that train, ghost-story train
through swamp and savanna movering movering,
over trestles of dew, through caves of the wish,
Midnight Special on a sabre track movering movering
first stop Mercy and the last Hallelujah.
Come ride-a my train
Mean mean mean to be free (66-72)
Hayden masterfully combines the elements of theme, structure, imagery and compression of language to powerful effect, performing the griot's ultimate duty according to Hale: providing "a reading of the past for audiences in the present."