Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!
—Robert Browning, “Memorabilia”
Spring semester of 1974, I was a student in a class Robert Hayden taught at Connecticut College, where he was filling in for William Meredith. My embarrassment about the little I remember of Hayden’s class is only exceeded by the little I remember of the classes I had with William Meredith. Neither poet talked about craft in any of the ways that are conventional today. They both were modest and yet compelling presences in the classroom and what advice they did give us about our attempts to write poems ran along the line of what Berryman gave W. S. Merwin, who in suggesting that the young Merwin change the “usual order of the same words in a line of verse,” observed, “why point out a thing twice.” I do remember that Meredith always cleared his voice before speaking and that Hayden often tilted his head slightly, keeping his arms at his sides. He had beautiful hands with long fingers, the kind you’d associate with pianists and classical guitarists. He looked at the back of the classroom before he tilted his head to look at us. The plain black frame glasses he wore were set with the thickest lenses I had ever seen.
As Meredith has said about poetry, it conveys the force of an experience rather than the experience itself. This, I think, is true of my short time as a student in Robert Hayden’s class, that it is the quiet force of my encounter with him that has stayed with me and in fact has increased in intensity over the past fifty years.
I might have been aware that Hayden was coming from the University of Michigan, but I had never read one of his poems and I certainly knew nothing about his background. I can’t even say that I knew he was Black. In some ways, what I didn’t know in advance about him—my ignorance of his work and life—created the ideal conditions for experiencing more purely who he was as a man.
Before Meredith left on his sabbatical, he asked me for the favor of collecting his mail, and he suggested that I befriend Hayden, who would be living alone in a small visiting-faculty house that was hidden by a hedge of overgrown lilacs. I didn’t know exactly what it meant to befriend him, and so after the first day of class, I thought I should introduce myself. To look at Robert Hayden in close proximity for the first time meant you had to come to terms with the distortion the lenses of his glasses performed on his eyes. I was still too much of a self-involved teenager, even though I was twenty, not to think he looked odd—a friend and I would come to dub him “Moon Man”—but I had enough maturity, if that’s what you’d call it, to find in their blurry, goofy, and troubling enlargement a mesmerizing power. A few days later I gave him a tour of the campus, which set a pattern for short walks we took, off and on, throughout the semester. He was easy to be with, although during our first walk he told me that he was more or less purblind and that it would be helpful to have me show him the most efficient way from where he was staying to the English department, the mail room, and library. On these walks he mainly drew me out with questions about my family, and when he found out I grew up in Arizona, he talked about how much he loved the time he spent in Mexico. He didn’t pontificate, and he wasn’t interested in filling me with literary knowledge, or telling me stories about how he became a poet. What he did do was to pay just enough serious attention to me, when I was in his company, to make me hope more than I already did that I might one day become a writer. Deference and quiet were my default modes, so much so that I can’t recall anything I said to him during the entire semester. Well, that’s not completely true.
_____
Perhaps it was in early May, near the end of the semester, that I was leaving Meredith’s office, having dropped off his mail. Hayden, who was talking to a colleague in the hall, broke off his conversation to congratulate me on winning one of the College’s annual poetry awards. I hardly had time to thank him before he said, “The poem is shocking. Where did it come from?” It was an absurd poem in the voice of an eighteenth-century woman who leaves England to voyage to America because she is pregnant and unmarried. Its premise was ripped off from Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, but I didn’t have enough presence of mind to say so. What I did say was, “Mr. Hayden, I don’t know.” That’s all I can remember of what I said to him during the semester: “I don’t know.” The impress of that moment has stayed with me not only because Hayden admitted he was shocked by what I’d written but also because of his question. He wasn’t asking about the literal source of the poem, but rather probing me for its psychic origins. This isn’t something I understood at that moment, believe me, but rather, it exfoliated over time, alerting my novice self to the obvious but profound truth that poems have a source deeper and more mysterious than the source we might be aware of.
And speaking of the end of the semester, Hayden invited the class to have its final meeting at night at the house he’d been staying in. His wife, Erma, who had been living in NYC for the semester, was visiting and had baked cookies for the occasion, but plagued by spring allergies she was holed up in the bedroom. The house was small, and we could hear her coughing and sneezing regularly. We had been asked to bring a poem to present to the group, one that had been revised and worked over. We were asked as well to say something about our revision process. After we went around the room, someone asked Hayden if he would read a poem or two of his own and talk about his revision process. He didn’t consider for long the request before he pushed himself up from his spot at the end of a couch and disappeared for a few minutes in the direction of his wife’s coughing. We could hear them talking together but not what they were saying. When he came back, he was carrying a stack of paper on top of which was a pamphlet. The papers were organized in various layers of color: green, blue, red, yellow, and orange. He explained that the different colored paper tracked the progress of his revisions. He said he wouldn’t embarrass himself by reading early versions but that he wanted to give us a sense of how many drafts might be necessary before he considered a poem finished.
Hayden put the pamphlet and the stack of papers on a coffee table in front of the couch and told us he would read two poems. From the stack, he peeled off the top sheet and positioned himself to face us. The piece of paper was traffic-cone orange. He brought it to within a few inches of his glasses, something he frequently did when considering our poems during office visits. He looked over the page at us and then lowering it said he would read “The Night-Blooming Cereus,” but before he did, he wanted us to know the occasion of the poem. Erma and he were spending a week in Seattle, house-sitting for friends. The friends alerted them to the fact that their night-blooming cereus would likely flower while they were there. Hayden explained how the flowers of this plant, a cactus, bloomed only once and at night and then by morning perished. His wife and he would divide up the nights, like parents looking after a newborn, to make sure they didn’t miss the blossoming. The poem, one of Hayden’s finest, describes the event, the waiting that preceded it, and the different attitudes Erma and he had toward the reticent plant. Hayden’s reading voice was much like the way he spoke—a lovely, steady middle range that occasionally lingered on consonants and extended vowels. It was not a sing-song voice but one that was rich with resonance. The drama he created in his reading was, as I look back on it, the result of his pacing and of his ability to express the music in the poem’s syntax as much as the meaning. But what I remember most about the way he read was the intense intimacy it created among us in that room, an intimacy that comes alive in me whenever I read one of his poems.
The ending of the poem (“We spoke / in whispers when / we spoke / at all . . .”) is itself an enactment of intimacy, dramatizing what we might think of as lyric presence or lyric attention, which is achieved the closer utterance (“whispers”) approaches silence. But the intimacy of Hayden’s reading was not the only one we were a party to that evening. The other intimacy was transmitted through the muffled voices of Hayden and Erma coming from the bedroom when he went to retrieve what he would read to us. Their voices registered as “whispers,” certainly, but their exchange, as brief as it was, embodied that hard to define but unmistakably complex and fraught intimacy of a long-married couple. I felt like an eavesdropper, and the disquieting discomfort of that moment has always been a part of my memory of Robert Hayden.
But that’s not all—when he finished reading “The Night-Blooming Cereus,” he returned the draft to its stack and picked up the pamphlet. He said the second poem he would read, “The Peacock Room,” took him several years to write. He went on to describe how James Whistler had been hired by the British shipowner and art connoisseur Frederick Leyland in the 1870s to finish a room in his mansion that had been designed by the architect Tom Jeckyll. What Whistler produced by painting large, gold peacocks on panels of blue Spanish leather was shockingly beautiful, he told us, but they created an uproar for the way the gorgeous peacocks, one of which seemed to be dancing on a shower of gold coins, upbraided Leyland for his wealth and connoisseurship, and by some accounts this violent adornment drove the architect, Jeckyll, to suicide. In the late nineteenth century, American industrialist Charles Freer bought the Peacock Room. Had it dismantled and shipped to Detroit, where it was reassembled in his mansion, but is now a part of the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. All of this was prelude to telling us that he learned about the Peacock Room from Betsy Graves Reyneau, a lifelong Detroit friend, an accomplished painter herself, who told him, several years before she died, that as a gift for her twelfth birthday, her party was held in the Peacock Room.
It was unlikely that any of us had ever seen or heard of the Peacock Room, but most of us would have known that someone named Whistler had painted the iconic “Grandma Moses.” Equally unlikely was that any of us were able to easily follow the details of Hayden’s poem, even as he read it slowly with its difficulty in mind. What stood out from the poem for me at the time was the way it began and ended with large questions: “Ars Longa Which is crueler / Vita Brevis life or art?” and “What is art? / What is life? / What the Peacock Room?” Perhaps, most vividly, in addition to the “peacocks . . . trampling coins of gold,” was the horrifying image of his “compassionate / clear-eyed . . . belovèd friend,” Betsy Graves Reyneau, conjured in her afterlife as a “Med School / cadaver, flesh-object / pickled in formaldehyde.”
While “The Night-Blooming Cereus” concentrated on a single dramatic event, which made it possible for a less experienced reader of poetry like myself to comprehend it more fully from a single listening, “The Peacock Room” was a poem of loosely cohering fragments at the center of which was Hayden’s first visit to the room at the Freer, a visit he made in memory of his recently deceased friend, and which provoked him to think about the vexed and cruel relationship between art and life. A poem I knew quite well, however, was W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” I also knew because he’d mentioned in class once that he had been a student of Auden’s at the University of Michigan. It occurred to me as Hayden was reading “The Peacock Room” that there was a relationship between it and Auden’s famous poem. It was a relationship I perceived more than I understood, but it helped me later to think about how influence and the development of thematic idioms are often subtle and that beyond mere imitation, like my naive and preposterous one of Berryman, they can take decades to appear.
A year later, I spent spring break in Washington, D.C., determined to visit the Peacock Room. Although I had yet to see and read Hayden’s poem, it had haunted me. Not only did I want to experience Whistler’s creation but I wanted to experience the intimacy of standing where Hayden had stood.
Inside the museum I wandered for a while until I turned into a long hallway at the end of which was stationed what turned out to be the bronze bo-dhisattva that Hayden sees as he’s leaving the Peacock Room, and which ends the poem. It was a detail that hadn’t really registered, because I wasn’t certain what a bodhisattva was or what one looked like. Seeing the serene and large figure at the end of the hallway at first startled me. However, as I came closer to it, what Hayden describes as its “ancient smile” felt reassuring, as if once one entered the Peacock Room, regardless of expectation, one was being watched over by a beneficent spirit. As I entered the room, I was surprised to find the space smaller than I imagined and less overtly gaudy. The narrow vertical shelves that displayed a collection of Leyland’s Chinese porcelain caught my eye at first, but then as I began to pick out the shapes of peacocks that were painted on three large, wooden shutters, the shelves and porcelain almost evaporated. At one end of the room, on the upper half of a wall, two large peacocks face each other. One with its long train of tail feathers spread beneath it seems to be in retreat, while the other with its tail fanned and wings outstretched, head and neck alert, holds its ground. Most significantly, the bird in retreat appears to be shedding its feathers that as they fall transform into gold coins. Whatever drama Whistler intended for these particular peacocks to play out, it made sense to me that Hayden might find in them that “trampling” of gold coins the poem alludes to. And I could feel, too, how his merely entering and standing in the room provoked those large questions: “Which is crueler / life or art?” and, again, “What is art? / What is life? / What the Peacock Room?”
After finishing college, I moved to London, hoping to find my way as a writer. In the room of the flat I was living in, I found in a stack of books the thin chapbook that Hayden had read “The Peacock Room” from to our class two years earlier. It was titled The Night-Blooming Cereus and on the cover was a charcoal portrait of Hayden. It had a stapled binding and contained seven poems in addition to the title poem. The man whose flat I lived in worked as a literary editor, and when I showed him what I’d found, he couldn’t remember ever seeing it and wasn’t familiar with Hayden’s poetry. I told him that Robert Hayden had been one of my college teachers. This seemed to please him. “Then you must have it,” he told me.
For the first time, I was able to read for myself the poems that Hayden had read to our class. But equally important, I was able to see what they looked like arranged on the page and to think about their structure, not that I was sophisticated in my thinking. “The Night-Blooming Cereus,” as I had surmised, was a singular “marveling,” to use Hayden’s word, and a beholding by two people of the cactus’s brief flowering. The sentences are clear and descriptive, although they are broken into short, sinuous lines, organized into jagged quatrains that I imagined mimicked the way Hayden and his wife observed the blooming from their different perspectives, with one looking over the shoulder of the other. And it was exhilarating, the way the poem at the beginning invites the reader into an ongoing activity:
And so for nights
we waited, hoping to see
the heavy bud
break into flower.
I felt as if I was in the same room looking with Robert and Erma and that their anticipation was mine. And that’s the way encounters with poems were for me almost half a century ago: immediate, visceral, and surprising. Encounters that often left me vertiginous.
With the poem in hand, I could take time with it, moving past my initial response to consider a phrase like “tribal sentience” or how the allusion to “Backster’s polygraph” complicates the moment by introducing a new register of diction. I could see that because the last stanza contains fewer words than any of the others, it has the effect of melting away into the silence it describes. Similarly, it was instructive to watch how the literal “moonlight” on the flower’s unfolding petals transforms the blossom, as it begins to die, into a “foredoomed” “Lunar presence,” and how with this transformation, Hayden connects us to a world “older than human / cries, ancient as prayers. . . .” before enveloping us in silence.
If the ongoing activity of “The Night-Blooming Cereus” is prayerful attention to a single dramatic event, then the ongoing activity of “The Peacock Room” is an expansive, ingathering, questioning meditation: “Thoughts in the Peacock Room, where briefly I shelter.” The twisted, dangling necklace design of “The Night-Blooming Cereus” had been replaced by six nine-line stanzas that depending on how you counted were comprised of three tercets or a quatrain and a quintet. It was hard to know which pattern Hayden might have intended. Just as in a more startling fashion, the arrangement of the first two lines presented a modest syntactic problem in the form of a typographical puzzle.
Ars Longa Which is crueler
Vita Brevis life or art?
How should these lines be read? Left to right, top to bottom, or are they like two caption bubbles of Hayden’s “thoughts,” one of which contains Hippocrates’ famous aphorism and the other Hayden’s question/comment about the aphorism’s assertion? The visual experience of those lines, however, had the effect of overriding the need to sort out the syntax, because I mostly perceived the grouping and meaning of those four phrases as a whole, simultaneously. They provided a visual signal that Hayden’s response to the Peacock Room would not be a mere beholding or marveling but rather a more totalizing experience that’s shadowed by the large questions he asks about the relationship of art to life, the cruelty each engenders, and the interaction of memory and the imagination. Perhaps more importantly, Hayden’s stanzas, as the word is often defined, are rooms, spaces, scenic arenas in which his questions find embodiment as he reacts to his encounter with Whistler’s creation.
Perhaps it’s the grief for his dead friend, which he carries with him into the room, that begins to turn the space into something like a house of horrors. The provisional sense of shelter he initially feels, summons, either by way of memory or imagination, the “glow of a lamp shaped like a rose” that his “mother would light / for [him] some nights to keep / Raw-Head-And-Bloody-Bones away.” This intimate scene from his childhood, however, can’t shield him entirely from the cruelties that will come alive in the room. Faced with the “Exotic, fin de siècle, unreal” beauty of Whistler’s “vision chambered in gold,” Hayden holds it up to the implacable, scornful, and rebuking energies of twentieth-century history, represented by “Hiroshima Watts My Lai.” In doing so, Hayden recognizes how Whistler has designed his “lyric space” to enact a drama between the personal and historical. He imagines that the “satiric arabesque of gold peacocks” mocks the capitalist, patron, and connoisseur Frederick Leyland and that the room’s overall arrangement ridicules Jeckyll’s original design by adorning it with “vengeful harmonies.” Even Betsy Graves Reyneau, “ghost of the happy child” who had her twelfth birthday in the Peacock Room, can only temporarily be “concealed” by the peacocks’ “spread tails” before they “reveal / her” as an “eyeless, old—Med School / cadaver, flesh-object / pickled in formaldehyde.” The horror of imagining his “compassionate, / clear-eyed” friend as a “flesh-object” is too much for Hayden to endure. It is also too much for him to think that Whistler’s cruel arrogance might tarnish the happiness of his own memory of his friend’s joy of her birthday gift. And so, Hayden pleads, “No more. No more.” And with these two sonorous, resigned, elegiac imperatives, like gesturing hands, signaling someone or something to stay away, to stop, Hayden resists the terrifying power the room has had on him and looks for a way out.
Recently, I read in an address Hayden delivered at the Library of Congress in 1977, taken from the only chapter he wrote of an intended autobiography, that he thought of poems as “his mirror shield” that allowed him to gaze “upon the Medusa without being turned to stone.” I can see now, after having lived with this poem for many years, how close Hayden came, so to speak, to turning into stone by what the peacocks revealed to him of his dead friend. I’m not thinking only of her hideous, unbearable cadaver but also of Whistler’s unbearable implication that Hayden’s “belovèd friend,” because of the privilege she enjoyed by having such a birthday, is to be mocked as well. But this implication, of course, was only a product of Hayden’s imagination or perhaps I should say, the dissonance created by the collision of his imagination with his remembrance of his friend. Regardless, it brought him to the brink of what his psyche could accommodate, and he saved himself by uttering: “No more. No more.” These phrases, however, do more than act as a mirror shield protecting him from further horror; they also have the calming effect of a spell used to neutralize the room’s “vengeful harmonies,” so that the peacocks, now as Hayden begins to leave, can “resume their splendored pose.”
But the drama of the Peacock Room hasn’t finished, because as Hayden turns to exit, he encounters Whistler’s portrait of Leyland’s daughter gleaming “like imagined flowers” and while the peacocks might have resumed their stationary poses, the exotic portrait provokes him again, as at the beginning of the poem, to ask, “What is art? / What is life? / What the Peacock Room?” Somehow, I understood I shouldn’t expect to find an answer, but rather it was enough to feel the question’s pressing urgency. What he gives us instead of an answer is something like a perspective as he imagines the portrait’s “Rose-leaves and ashes” drifting over the room’s “portals, gently spinning toward / a bronze Bodhisattva’s ancient smile.” I can’t say if it had been Freer’s intention to place a bodhisattva near the entrance to the Peacock Room, but it’s clear that Hayden by pointing out its “ancient smile” was aware of the irony of having, in bronze no less, Buddhism’s human paragon of compassionate enlightenment as a tranquil and reassuring sentinel minding the room.
My own thoughts about “The Peacock Room” have changed and developed over the years since I first heard Hayden read it; since my several visits to the Freer; and especially since the coincidental or fated discovery of the chapbook in that London flat. It is a poem of immense complexity, both in its architecture and in its interrogating of human experience. Its greatness, I have come to understand, is that it gives us both the force of an experience as well as the experience itself. As years passed, what I knew about Robert Hayden both as a man and as a poet would become more complex as well. I would learn that he had experienced various, extreme cruelties as a child; that he and his wife were devout Bahá’ís; that he had suffered excruciating public humiliation in the late sixties by Black Arts poets; that his sexual identity was complicated; that the body of his work includes some of the first and most innovative and now enduring poems about African American history, from Middle Passage to Civil Rights; and that he is certainly one of the most significant twentieth-century American poets. But what has stayed with me most powerfully is the plain manner in which I first saw him; in which we walked together through the campus; in which at the request of his students, he read two exquisite poems in a voice as intimate as I’ve ever heard; and in which he turned to me in a hallway filled with early spring light and asked, about a poem my twenty-year-old self had written, a question that I still hear clearly, “Where did it come from?”
