Essay Questions

How does Hayden make the title an essential element in establishing the tone and situating the narrative of “Those Winter Sundays.”

“Those Winter Sundays” is all about an evocative recall by the speaker of a very specific type of ritual that the adult can recall quite clearly from his childhood; clear enough that it stands out from what my have been similar events. The central narrative event here is the father getting up early to prepare the home for the speaker when he was a child in an act of self-sacrifice mild enough on itself to go unnoticed by a child, but powerfully resonant as ritual for the small sacrifice to loom large in the more mature mind of the adult recalling it. The sacrifice was getting up before anyone else in the cold in order to make the house more comfortably warm for the child. The act of getting up early to do this could have been relegated to a daily occurrence like preparing for school, but the allusion to polishing good shoes makes the ritual clear, but only in connection to the title revealing it is Sunday during the winter. The decision to make this poem about waking up to a warm home and polished shoes in which to go to church rather than waking up to a warm home in preparation for going to school cements the deal for being evocative. By definition, Sunday evoke a stronger feeling than weekdays if only by virtue of “feeling like a Sunday” tells you a lot more than “feeling like a Wednesday” while avoiding the negative connotations associated with Mondays or the positive feelings toward Fridays.

In what ways does Hayden exploit the senses to create imagery in “Runagate Runagate” that become an essential part of its narrative about making a desperately dangerous bid for freedom as an escaped slave?

Hayden subtly compels the reader to engage his senses to draw him into the narrative of this poem about the Underground Railroad. Just looking at the poem helps to replicate the sense of confusion that would have greeted an escaping slave. Just the mere act of reading the poem keeps the reader’s eyes in a constant state of motion with a construction outside the typical formation of blocks of verse separated into stanzas. Single words on a line indent one space over to create what looks like steps or stairs. Left alignment suddenly shifts to right alignment creating large empty spaces before things back to the left again. When the verse suddenly turns into n a wanted poster, spaces appear between words and phrases. The entire poem is created with the purpose of forcing a reader to shift his focus without warning much as an escaping slave might. In addition the sense of sight, the poem also creates a sense of tension and danger with imagery that brings to life the sounds that would be hard along the trail: there is alternately weeping and singing, not too far in the distance behind are the hunters in pursuit accompanied by hound dogs, later comes the sound of desperation that success is impossible and they’ll never make it and the hooting of an owl makes turns leaves into faces inside the mind. To these are added the tactile sensations that complete the image: letters branded into the skin, fear of horror stories about those who’ve gone before and failed succumbing to scorpion stings and bodies being trapped in quicksand.

In what way is “Frederick Douglass” both an example of and a rejection of form guiding content?

Very much unlike “Runagate Runagate,” Hayden adopts the formal rules and conventions associated with the sonnet for his tribute to the legendary Civil War-era hero in the fight for the abolition of slavery. The sonnet has strict rules regarding the formality of its structure and is situated as one of the classical examples of the art of poetry. Following the tradition and convention of such a classic form, the content rejects the experimentation of the poem about that seeks to replicate the experience of becoming a fugitive slave on the run in preference of what might be termed an academic or even scholarly consideration of Frederick Douglass as an historical icon. Until the end, however, when the poet suddenly seems to call into question the traditions and conventions of memorializing historical heroes. By the final lines, the poem has rejected the idea of form guiding content with a rebellion of content. The rebellion does not extend to form; it is a rebellion of pure content in which the speaker questions the validity of traditional means of historical honor such as statues and instead urges that Douglass’ memorial be a living, breathing embodiment of the spirit of freedom expressed through everyone touched by his struggle.