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

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

When considering Hayden's Afro-Modernist method and vision, the key poem is "The Diver." Hayden's conspicuous placement of "The Diver" in his evolving corpus signals its importance. Although first published in 1962, the poem was omitted from the original published version of A Ballad of Remembrance. Instead, it first appeared in Rosey Pool's collection of African-American poets Beyond the Blues, published in England. Nonetheless, in the 1966 Selected Poems, the 1975 Angle of Ascent, and the 1985 Collected Poems, "The Diver" is placed at the beginning of each collection or as the first poem in the Ballad of Remembrance section. If the "Counterpoise Manifesto" signals the beginning of Hayden's mature writings, "The Diver" is the poetic preface to his best work, from "A Ballad of Remembrance" to "American Journal."

The vertical emphasis of "The Diver" is clear in the narrow, single stanza which cuts a path down the page. Immediately, the reader enters a world in which the rational distinctions, or identities, which organize and separate phenomena fail to apply. To dive into Hayden's Afro-Modernism is to enter a poetic world of tremendous precision in which would-be stable distinctions become elusive and transitional. The title-line sits above the stanza like a diver on the edge of the dock or boat. The title both is and isn't part of the opening sentence:

The Diver


Sank through easeful
azure.

While the pull of the syntax suggests the plunge, the capitalized S in "Sank" frustrates the continuity of identity between "The Diver" above the surface and "[that which] Sank through easeful / azure" (3). Most of the actions which occur on the dive have at least dual significance. The action takes place in overlapping, yet distinct, realms. The suggestion of 'sky-blue' in the word azure complicates the unidirectional nature of the diver's descent. On the way down, the diver attains both greater heights and depths.

The poem's structure troubles the distinctions that provide the foundations for modern social and psychological order. In Figures of Division, James Snead discusses how stable social and psychological frameworks depend on clearly demarcated categories of space and experience. Indeed, he argues that separation is one of the founding paradigms of Western thought.... It seems [that like societies] the mind uses various figures of division to defend itself against chaos" (7). Snead suggests that figures of division represent devices that suggest stable distinctions to efface the multi-leveled realities of connection, inter-dependence, and flux. As Du Bois noted, and as Ellison shows in his essay "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks," American culture is essentially interracial, a reality that casts the social divisions that uphold its order into doubt. As Snead argues, in order to efface uncomfortable realities of connection, rhetorical figures of division can, especially in cases of "economic and other kin ds of duress, [be taken to] a pathological limit" (14). Yet, from Whitman to the present, democratically inclined poets have sought to span the regional and racial divisions which order and threaten the nation. This spanning might well be the "thesis" image of Leaves of Grass, as it appeared on the first page of the first edition in 1855: