By Mary Karr
Sunday, August 10, 2008
As a kid, I doubted I could ever undertake for anybody a task as grisly as my daddy's preparation of the Sunday chicken: wringing its neck, relieving the purplish, prickly body of feathers, dismantling it with a butcher knife. Robert E. Hayden's reminiscence of his own father dutifully stoking the morning fire in "Those Winter Sundays" argues instead that any sacrifice for love is an elevating one.
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
The fact that Hayden's father -- black like Hayden -- also "polished my good shoes," enacting the shoeshine's traditionally servile role, makes the poem even more moving. The interesting biographical side note is, of course, that Hayden's biological parents gave him up to foster parents, but whether the "memory" is an orphan's longing or a fragment of an actual memory, the power of the poem is the same. The final phrase about "love's austere and lonely offices" has a grandeur and poise that elevate the duty to the level of religious ritual, as does the 14-line form of this sonnet, albeit in free verse. It's that same sense of dignity that Hayden brought to this next poem, which praises a different kind of sacrifice for another ancestor of his: the freed slave Frederick Douglass.
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; 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:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
In a loosely Petrarchan sonnet like this one, there's a turn in the last six lines when Douglass's vision is finally ushered into reality, not with bronze or rhetoric, as Hayden says, but with living creatures: "lives grown out of his life." Here's hoping we as a people are at last being united in that freedom.
( These poems of Robert E. Hayden are from "Collected Poems of Robert Hayden," edited by Frederick Glaysher. Copyright 1966 by Robert Hayden. Reprinted with permission of Liveright Publishing. )
Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."
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