Frederick Douglass (1946). Detailed description

“Frederick Douglass” is a sonnet that ends Hayden’s collection entitled A Ballad of Remembrance (1962). It is part of a suite of poems focused on African- American history: “A Middle Passage,” “O Daedalus, Fly Away Home,” “The Ballad of Nat Turner,” and “Runagate, Runagate.” The language is simple and direct, conversational yet lyrical. Some of the music of the poem results from his judicious use of repetition. For example, he repeats “this man . . . this former slave, this Negro.” And at the end of his catalog, he says again, “this man.” Each repetition lends emphasis and actually builds momentum.

The simplicity of the language also adds to its musical effect. The lines “this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth” include no difficult words, no elaborate metaphors. Hayden makes his point about the fundamental or essential quality of freedom through his simple words and the two basic elements to which he compares freedom—earth and air. He tells us that everyone must have freedom to live. It should not be, in his estimation, something awarded only the lucky few, who have earned it or can afford it. It should be like the air we breathe or the earth we walk on and use.

Likewise the language of the poem is accessible to nearly everyone. The only two words perhaps not immediately recognizable are diastole and systole. Yet they describe the routine action of the heart muscle at work—expanding and contracting. So they extend the point he is making about freedom’s becoming as “instinctual” as the working of the body, not something to decide about or think about, something that just is. By his equation, if one is human, one is free.

Noteworthy, too, is the way he compresses Frederick Douglass’s life into these lines:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien, this man, superb in love and logic, this man shall be remembered.

Hayden captures the essential qualities of Douglass’s life in these phrases. He uses his situation as a former slave to call for the abolition of slavery. Douglass, the poem says, was no mere “do-gooder”: He had experienced some of the harshest realities of slave life, captured in the phrase “this Negro, beaten to his knees.”

For Discussion or Writing
1. Read the poem, and then look at its parts. Use the punctuation to help you with your reading, especially the colon, semicolons, and periods. Using these marks to point the way, what seem to be the major divisions or ideas of the poem? How do they relate to each other?

2. Hayden’s use of sonnet form in “Frederick Douglass” has been compared to the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. After reading and considering “Frederick Douglass” as a poem in its own right, select one of Hopkins’s sonnets (“Pied Beauty” or “God’s Grandeur,” for example) and try to find evidence of Hopkins’s influence on Hayden’s work.