Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sundays (1962). Detailed description

“Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sundays” is part of a set of seven poems in A Ballad of Remembrance that people the landscape of Paradise Alley—where Robert Hayden grew up. In American Journal, his last published work, he includes an eight-part poem formally titled “Elegies for Paradise Alley,” which provides more specific portraits, but in these poems he begins chronicling the people and experiences he encountered there.

This poem mourns the death of a woman recognized in her community for the beauty of her singing, especially her church singing, on which her neighbors have depended. The manner of her death, gunshot wounds, stuns and saddens them, linking her death to something “Satan sweet-talked” her into doing. They mourn not only her passing but also because the way she died may bar her from heaven.

Although the poem tends toward narrative, we get only a slice of the story. We never know who the woman is exactly, only that she sang so beautifully, so powerfully, that she was considered God’s “fancy warbler.” The speaker asks, “Who’s going to make old hardened sinner men tremble now? . . . Who will sing Jesus down . . . ?” Clearly this is a loss felt by the whole community. This woman’s singing helped them in their “struggling along and doing without and being colored / all through blue Monday.” Who will take her place now? Where will they turn for that help now? Those questions are unanswered. Thus the poem comments, through the way it mourns the loss of this artist, the way art can function in people’s lives.

Its structure also imitates song, like a blues ballad while not strictly adhering to the blues form. The singer died on one of those “blue Mondays.” It also uses repetition in similar ways, as in the line “Who would have thought she’d end this way?” repeated at the end of each alternating stanza. And, as the blues does, it turns mourning into song.

Lord’s lost Him His mockingbird
His fancy warbler;
Satan sweet-talked her,
four bullets hushed her.
Who would have thought
she’d end that way?

The irony of the woman’s situation mimics the irony often found in blues lyrics as well. Although her art was powerful enough to lift her community toward the heavens, it fails her in the end. Whatever transcendence her Sunday singing created did not sustain her through her own troubled time in the weekday world.

More irony arises from the description of her lying in her coffin, looking so natural (as the phrase goes) “among the Broken Hearts and Gates Ajar” that are the symbols of death in this Christian community— the hearts representing the loved ones left behind as the deceased journeys into heaven through the open gates. But whether or not she will be permitted entry is in question in the poem. Thus the poem ends in lamentation—“Who would have thought, / who would have thought she’d end that way?” Unanswered, this final question hangs in the air.

For Discussion or Writing
1. What is the story that unfolds in this poem? What narrative details are missing? If you were investigating this for a news story, what would you try to find out besides what the poem reveals, as you interviewed the neighbors and church members? (Try to write that story.)

2. What do you notice about how Hayden has structured this poem—for example, how, when, and why does he use repetition? How does his technique affect how you respond to the story?