"Something patterned, wild, and free": Robert Hayden's angles of descent and the democratic unconscious

African American Review, Winter, 2002 by Edward M. Pavlic

Thus reality
  bedizened in the warring colors
     of a dream
parades through these
  arcades ornate with music and
     the sea.

Thus reality
  become unbearably a dream
     beckons
out of reach in flyblown streets
  of lapsing rose and purple, dying
     blue.

Thus marimba'd night
  And multifoliate sea become
     phantasmal
space, and there,
  light-years away, one farewell image
     Burns and fades and burns. (30)

In Selected Poems, the two poems that follow "The Diver" image the relationship of cultural tradition (stories, lore, and religious faith) to the forces of modern rationalization and disenchantment. Hayden dedicated "Electrical Storm" to his friends and neighbors in Nashville, the devout Seventh Day Adventists Arna and Alberta Bontemps, who appear as lifesavers in the poem. The poem tests the relationship among (scientific) understanding, (religious) belief, and cultural practice as they contend with the intensities and contingencies of modem experience. This first stanza describes the God-fearing elders' beliefs as they cower from a thunderstorm in a Fated universe:

He don't like ugly.
Have mercy. Lord, they prayed.
seeing the lightning's
Mene Mene Tekel
hearing the preaching thunder's deep
Upharsin. (13)

Hayden's use of Old Testament imagery recalls James Weldon Johnson's expansion of "dialect" into the prophetic tongues of God's Trombones.

The call-and-response rhythms are interrupted by the wrath/lightning. Hayden's concision sheers, "He don't like ugly," from its flip-side response (in my experience, something like, and He ain't too particular about pretty!), allowing him to cut to the quick. At the ambiguous center of the first stanza is the ethos of inadequacy and unworthiness which Hayden images in the Old Testament verse. In "The Poet and His Art," he explained his use of the refrain from the story of Belshazzar: "Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin--these were the words that God wrote on King Belshazzar's palace wall, meaning 'thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting"' (148). Embedded in the scene, Hayden's Old Testament imagery connects with a black cultural vocabulary and conserves the ambiguities of the diver's Afro-Modernist vision. The tension between would-be "folk" superstition (or even colonized internalization of shame) and the improvised confrontation with the reality of the human condition it invokes is unresolved. No matter how the tension plays out, the self-scrutiny mitigates against hubris and pride in ways which provide a foundation for communal and universal tolerance and forgiveness. Despite or because of the irresolution, the poem clearly redeems the deep implications of this particular feature of Old Testament poetics and the sensibility of cultural elders.

Hayden shifts perspective to emphasize the rational and scientific nature of modem subjectivity. In the second stanza, the persona is grown, "colleged (as they said)." He understands the scientific explanations of "pressure systems,/colliding massive energies/that make a storm" (13). The third stanza puts the intellectual progress to the test of experience. Much like Flannery O'Connor's hyper-rationalist "schoolteacher" in The Violent Bear It Away, the persona in "Electrical Storm" is comfortable with the peace/piece of mind offered by his scientific understanding. As he drives through a storm, the energy of the scene begins to outstrip the understanding of the persona. The pure science of the storm becomes "warring weather./Wind and lightning havocked/berserked in wires, trees." The intensity of sensation and random danger of the storm force the persona to recall "Jehovah's oldtime wrath." The final image in the stanza recalls a dangerous event in Hayden's life, transformed in the poem through what he terme d his "detachment and philosophical calm" (148). Returned home to find the house intact, a message from on High confronts the persona's understanding: