Middle Passage (1962). Detailed description

“Middle Passage” illustrates Robert Hayden’s many poetic skills: his ability to craft a whole from many parts and effectively introduce many voices. It also employs his full narrative, dramatic, and lyrical abilities. Hayden began his research in 1941, shortly after completing his work as a writer for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), conducting much of it at the Schomburg Collection in New York.

According to Pontheolla Williams, one of his biographers, four versions of this poem were published from 1941 to 1966, testifying to Hayden’s commitment to craftsmanship (Williams 81-82). “Middle Passage” provides multiple perspectives on the transatlantic slave trade, ending with the story of the Amistad revolt. In shaping the poem, Hayden labors to educate his readers—heart, mind, and soul—about the complex human perils and realities this story illustrates.

He establishes mood and setting from the poem’s opening gambit, a list of names of slave ships: “Jesus, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy" As names with religious associations, they are ironic; they also call attention to the fact that several European countries, Spain and Portugal, among others, are deeply involved in the transatlantic slave trade. The additional ships’ names later in the poem—“Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Anne" are notably English this time. They help establish the ironic tone of the poem and situate the narrative in the context of actual history.

After this opening, the first voice is heard—an observer/poet/speaker’s voice setting the scene:
Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,
sharks following the moans the fever and the dymg;
horror the corposant and compass rose.
Middle Passage: voyage through death
to life upon these shores.
Readers are, thus, immediately plunged into the darkness and death of the slave ships.

Hayden also works throughout the poem to establish the complexities and tensions that surround this venture from first to last without submerging us in sentiment. The strategy he uses most often here is to withhold focusing on the turmoil of the humans in the hold, focusing instead on that of the members of the crew. He evokes the “horror” of the slave ships almost entirely from the vantage point of the captain and crew rather than that of the enslaved Africans. We see and hear the mounting terror of crew members—fear of disease, of rebellion, of the hatred that cannot be “stared down.”

The first direct experience readers vicariously participate in is provided through a ship’s log entry dated “10 April 1800.” In this section the writer describes the “terrifying sickness” that has “scratched sight from the Capt.’s eyes” and threatens the rest of the crew. So vivid is this description that the plight of the captives below decks is temporarily held at bay. This strategy, however, makes the point that participating in trading in human life has hellish consequences for everyone.

Hayden also supplies important information to help readers understand the magnitude of this trade. For example, he articulates its major motivation: “black gold, black ivory, black seed.” Trade in human cargo (African cargo, in this case) was a very lucrative enterprise at every point. Even at the point of purchase, it was a “good” business investment if done wisely and well because it could enable the owner to produce “homegrown” captives—those born into captivity. Then the owner, himself, could sell these people to earn a profit as well as to recoup his original investment. Still the reader grows increasingly aware of the cost—physical, mental, moral—of such business practices. Hayden communicates these difficult and distasteful realities through the language and structure of the poem.

One means by which he conveys the complex layers of this story is through his poet persona. Using this voice, he comments on the import or meaning of the details and events the poem communicates, such as in this refrain, a rewording of Ariel’s song in the first act of Shakespeare’s The Tempest:

Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,
of his bones New England pews are made,
those were altar lights that were his eyes.

These lines underscore the ironic ways in which Christianity is used in the service of enslaving other humans. Later in the poem, the voice states:

Shuttles in the rocking loom of history, the dark ships move, the dark ships move, their bright ironical names like jests of kindness on a murderer’s mouth.

In this commentary we hear a tinge of bitterness and anger. But Hayden is careful to use this device sparingly. His aims are larger than simple protest; he aims to render a complex view of the many perspectives involved in this dark historical moment. Thus the structure of the poem operates as a camera with multiple lenses—drawing readers into individual perspectives then pulling back to provide a wider view.

Returning for a moment to the previously discussed ship’s log entry, readers can appreciate how this works. This entry provides a wider view:

10 April 1800—
Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says their moaning is a prayer for death, ours and their own.

Through this quote, Hayden establishes certain “facts,” for instance, that rebelliousness and the longing for death of the enslaved were often conditions aboard slave ships. He uses words from the ship’s log to do so. Hayden thereby counters arguments from his own times that the conditions in which Africans were enslaved were mostly humane and that they were, if not content, at least docile and subservient. Thus he accomplishes another pedagogical goal.

He uses other narrative devices as well to tell the many stories intertwined here, such as the segments he offers from legal depositions. One of these, for example, provides the narrative of The Bella Rose. Through this segment, readers meet one of the two black individuals whose stories are offered here. This one is the story of a woman, named by the crew “the Guinea Rose.” It brings to life the conditions young women often suffered aboard these ships, ending, in this case, with fiery death, a mad captain, and the anonymous agony of the African men who remained chained below deck. Yet Hayden limits the focus of this segment to that of the men “who fought to lie with her,” instead of her emotions and reactions. The story is all the more arresting because it is told in such a dispassionate voice.

Hayden also draws on the power of first person; moreover, he uses it to complicate the reader’s view. His first-person narrator is a man who has been a crew member on a slave ship for 20 years or more. The source for the disturbing historical details of African collusion and reciprocal greed in this tale of horror, the sailor tells the story of a chief derisively named King Anthracite by white slavers. This chief captures members of other tribes, murdering the old and sick and sending the young off to their horrific fate for “trinkets.” The lust for riches has driven both the sailor and the African chief into perpetrating these crimes, both men succumbing to this particularly virulent “tropical fever.” It is ultimately a very destructive one, eventually ending, in the case of the sailor/narrator, with the “melting [of] his bones.”

The narrative sections of Hayden’s poem are woven together with bits of hymns and prayers that further underscore the ironies of the material presented. For example, “Jesus Savior Pilot Me / Over Life’s Tempestuous Sea” functions on multiple levels. Certainly whoever finds himself or herself on a slave ship, as an enslaved man or woman, one of the enslavers, or an “innocent bystander,” needs spiritual and psychological guidance. And if the person offering up such a prayer is really one of the slavers, he needs more guidance than the words seem to request. In Hayden’s view, that person is “lost” ethically and morally. Someone literally lost on the tempestuous seas of the Atlantic Ocean might also offer these lines. Hayden’s language suggests all these possibilities simultaneously.

Finally, however, the poem arrives at its dramatic conclusion—the tale of the Amistad revolt. Hayden has once again made a surprising choice. Instead of using the point of view of the hero—Cinquez— Hayden tells the story in the righteously indignant voice of a Spanish officer, one of the two white survivors of the revolt. Hayden explains the horror of the revolt from the view of the white men slaughtered. The officer expresses outraged disbelief that not only might such behavior be unpunished, but that Cinquez and his colleagues are being treated in any quarters as possible heroes. But at the end, the poet persona interjects: “The deep immortal human wish, the timeless will . . . ,” arguing that the revolt expresses a deep-seated, desperate universal longing for freedom.

Hayden has created a complex, layered, multivoiced poem. He allows us to experience the horrors of the Middle Passage from a variety of angles, showing readers its corrupting influence on all of its participants. Ending with “Voyage through death to life upon these shores,” he leaves us contemplating the quality of life all slavery’s survivors will encounter.

For Discussion or Writing
1. This poem is a complex weaving of many threads. Try to follow just one of them, for example, just the sections with “Jesus Savior” throughout part 1 or just the italicized passages in parts 1 and 2. By looking at just one thread, what can you understand about what it is trying to say and why Hayden has woven it into the poem?

2. Select one of the stories from the poem. Who is telling the story? To whom? Why? How does that particular story fit in with the poem overall?

3. Both T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Hart Crane’s “The Bridge” are said to have influenced “Middle Passage.” Choose one of these works and compare and contrast it with “Middle Passage.” Be careful to consider theme, language, structure, and tone, among other aspects.