O Daedalus, Fly Away Home by Robert Hayden Famous poems, famous poets
This poem's title, in sum, looks to me like a real cleaving, in both senses at once. Its seems that the Flying African legend can be traced back to an incident that occured in 1803 when a group of Igbo slaves revolted aboard a ship off the Georgia coast. They drowned the members of the crew, came ashore, walked to a creek and then drowned themselves in a mass suicide .
This dramatic poem of six stanzas develops the speaker's invitation to a girl to dance with him. William Meredith's book-jacket blurb is somewhat misleading in its insistence that Hayden "would not relinquish the title of American writer for any narrower identity," as is Arnold Rampersad's explanation of Hayden's desire to be counted as an "American" rather than a "black" or "African American" poet. This allusion in the title would seem to be a direct linking of the idea of literal flight through the air as escape from imprisonment and bondage. The poem can therefore be seen as demonstrating that the mythology of enslaved Africans is in every way the equal of the more conventionally lauded and elevated tales of classical mythology. Influenced equally by the poets of the Harlem Renaissance and by his teacher, W.
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African words and the names of African religious figures create a diction that promotes the voodoo theme so important in the lyric. The voodoo theme in "A Ballad of Remembrance" was a negative force that drew the observer into the charade of the Mardi Gras dance; in "Incense of a Lucky Virgin" it was treated as an unsuccessful potion that failed to bring her man home to a deserted mother. It is also used in "Witch Doctor"--a long character sketch included in A Ballad of Remembrance in which Hayden examines a modem avatar of a witch doctor who practices a mixture of voodooism and quasi-religious fundamentalism.
We who cleave to a home that was never fully ours, regardless of our labor, faith, and blood, are divided from ourselves by our compulsory awareness of how others see us. We are reminded every day that we are aliens here, and so we keep alive in ourselves the memory of the Middle Passage and the ancestors' flight. Symbolically Hayden's combining of Greek and African myth employs an image of flight, which becomes in several later poems a figurative expression of a spiritual condition.
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I'm thinking especially of Toomer's "Song of the Son," "November Cotton Flower," and "Tell Me," and some of the sound poems, in which he combines elements of an African American heritage with elements of a European legacy. In Hayden's "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home," those two influences are incipient in the title, one on either side of the comma. There's first the classical reference to the Athenian architect and inventor and then the allusion to the folk song ("Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, / Your home is on fire, and your children will burn").
Hayden's use of literary voodooism draws from the well of folklore that is an integral part of the Afro-American literary tradition. In this respect he joins a series of Afro-American writers from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Jean Toomer to Ralph Ellison. I was just reacting to your statement that since it wasn't realistic, it had to be metaphorical.
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Daedalus in Greek legend being the master craftsman who, imprisoned by Minos, crafted two pairs of wings so that he and his son, Icarus, could fly to freedom. Icarus flew too close to the sun, melting the wax that secured his feathers and falling to his death. This myth captures the duality of outcome possible in taking flight in escape. I remember your saying in your last letter that you thought Jean Toomer might be "more robustly earthy, and more innovative in technique than Hayden." While that might well be, the poem I've just quoted seems to me to have qualities, sensuous and especially innovative, that I also admire in Toomer's poems.
More specifically flight becomes in Hayden's poetry a symbol of spiritual transcendence and detachment. Significantly, this image of flight is here contemplated during the nighttime. The legends of flying Africans always involved those with a recent memory of a home elsewhere, to which they walked, swam, or flew over the ocean, trusting in traditional African spiritual beliefs that the souls of the dead return to their birthplace.
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The speaker in the poem has reconciled himself to his alienation, and only the memory of the grandfather's faith suggests the possibility of some alternative existence. The African American's determination to build a life and create a culture in the "New World" is a commitment his legendary flying ancestor refused to make. The grandfather who flies away versus the grandchild who remains, together figure the internal struggle that DuBois termed "double consciousness." Hayden's identity was formed at a time when blackness and African American culture were more severely stigmatized than they are today, and his work is marked by residual attitudes of the nineteenth century that black Americans strove to eradicate, at least from our own psyches, in the decades of the 1960s and '70s. If the mantras of racial self-esteem were unconvincing to Hayden, it was perhaps because his ambivalence about race was more complicated than a psychosocially comprehensible internalized racism.
The images together symbolize the blend of Western civilization with that of Africa, which the Afro-American actually represents. While this source does not seem to be particularly scholarly in its own right, it well reflects what I picked up reading elsewhere and neatly summarises the elements, though the author adds a conclusion that I've not seen explicitly elsewhere, though my reading into the subject has been limited. Hayden's fifth collection, A Ballad of Remembrance, was published in 1962, amid the political turmoil of that decade. The poems demonstrate the narrative ease and compelling character development that mark Hayden's best work and earned him two Hopwood Awards, a Grand Prize at the Dakar World Festival of the Arts, and the post of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress .
For this particular group of Igbo, death was preferable to a life in chains. As the story evolved, the heroes were said to have taken wing and flown away to African rather than died. Based on the historical context, it would seem that “flying to Africa” was actually a metaphor for suicide. Closely related to his Afro-American history poems but actually an Afro-American folk theme poem is "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home." It is the sole reprint from Hayden's prize-winning Hopwood Collection, and it is the poem that finally rewarded Hayden's efforts to have his work appear in Poetry. The poem is a skillful blend of Afro-American folk and classical subject matter. An epigraph included in the first two versions of the poem indicates that it is based on the "Legend of the Flying African," which Hughes and Bontemps state is a part of the folklore of the Georgia Sea Island blacks.
In "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home," however, voodooism is pictured as a positive force that effects escape from a dehumanizing plight. In the original legend, according to Bontemps, on a certain plantation there was an old man to whom the slaves turned for help when their suffering became unbearable. He would whisper a magic formula to them that was inaudible to others, whereupon he transformed them into winged creatures who flew back to Africa. Thus the poem demonstrates the truth of Ralph Ellison's perceptive critique that Afro-Americans in their folklore " away from the chaos of experience and from ourselves" in order to "depict the humor as well as the horror of our living." All of us who are Americans of African descent know this place as home, while at the same time knowing that our claim to belonging here continues to be contested. Double consciousness describes the psychic constitution of African Americans who are at home neither in Africa, where we are foreigners, nor in the U.S., which declined to assimilate us in its melting pot.
H. Auden, Robert Hayden sought to write a poetry that balanced an exploration of the problem of race with a technical mastery that no one could quibble with, qualify, or backhandedly praise as an example of "Black Literature." Hayden wanted to be read as an accomplished poet who happened to be black, or not at all. Notwithstanding the critic's complicity in constructing the reputation of a "transracial" artist, or the poet's conversion to the supposedly color-blind Baha'i religion, Hayden does not so much transcend race, as he employs racial identity as a metaphor for the opacity of the self. Race is one of myriad differences that might make a human being appear alien to another, one of the assorted labels that could cause an individual to feel estranged from others, as well as from himself. In 'O Daedalus, Fly Away Home’ a Georgia slave clings to his remembrances of Africa and recalls a myth of his 'gran' who 'spread his arms and/ flew away home'. The series ends with "The Ballad of Nat Turner," "Runagate Runagate," a tribute to the Underground Railroad, and finally, the hopeful "Frederick Douglass." Poet and Poem is a social media online website for poets and poems, a marvelous platform which invites unknown talent from anywhere in the little world.
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