poetry collection - Emily Cashman

Robert Hayden was born as Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan in 1913. His parents separated before his birth, and he mostly grew up with the family next door as his foster parents, which is how he took the last name Hayden. He published his first volume, Heart Shape in the Dust, in 1940, shortly before he enrolled in the University of Michigan. This book, Selected Poems: Robert Hayden, was edited by Frederick Glaysher, and it contains poems from four of Hayden's collections. In this analysis I'm focusing on the poems chosen from The Night-Blooming Cereus written in 1972. These selected poems all seem to involve the theme of change. The ideas of moving from one thing to another or evolving based on a new situation are present in Hayden's works. That subject matter is demonstrated in the poems of "Richard Hunt's 'Arachne'," "The Night Blooming Cereus," and "Traveling through Fog."


Traveling through Fog

Looking back, we cannot see,
except for its blurring lights
like underwater stars and moons,
our starting place.
Behind us, beyond us now
is phantom territory, a world
abstract as memories of earth
the traveling dead take home.
Between obscuring cloud
and cloud, the cloudy dark
ensphering us seems all we can
be certain of. Is Plato's cave.


This poem by Robert Hayden deals with the theme of change. It discusses how we don't know what lies ahead of us, and that even the past can be blurred as well. The future is cloudy and obscure, so we can't be certain of what it holds. Hayden suggests that the only thing we know for sure is Plato's cave. This is in reference to The Allegory of the Cave and Hayden uses this reference to draw on the ideas that there is so much in the world that is unknown to us and it's difficult to make decisions that can allow us to "break free from our chains" and move forward in life.
If I were to write a poem, I think I would use punctuation similar to how Hayden has. His poems are filled with long sentences with lots of commas and few periods. I like how he used the period at the end to emphasize his point about Plato's cave, and I would attempt to do something like that as well. I think my style would involve some rhyme scheme, which Hayden rarely uses, because I like the structure it forces the poem to have.


Hayden, Robert. Selected Poems: Robert Hayden. Ed. Frederick Glaysher. New York City: Liveright, 2013. Print.