Blues, Poetry, Temperature, and Guilt
Every Friday, Ta-Nehisi Coates posts a poem and asks his readers for their thoughts.
Today's is Middle Passage by Robert Hayden. A white man writing about slave ships. From white perspectives. Sympathetic, it seems, to everyone involved.
It made me think of Benito Cereno, of course. But it also made me think of Taj Mahal's blues version of Langston Hughes's Crossing. Strange the contrast between the fever in the Hayden poem and the chill in Hughes.It yanks me back into Melville:Whether this haggardness had aught to do with criminality could not be determined; since, as intense heat and cold, though unlike, produce like sensations, so innocence and guilt, when, through causal association with mental pain, stamping any visible impress, use one seal - a hacked one. Crossing is track 6 on An Evening of Acoustic Music.
"10 April 1800--
Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says
their moaning is a prayer for death,
ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.
Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter
to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under."
Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says
their moaning is a prayer for death,
ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.
Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter
to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under."
It made me think of Benito Cereno, of course. But it also made me think of Taj Mahal's blues version of Langston Hughes's Crossing. Strange the contrast between the fever in the Hayden poem and the chill in Hughes.It yanks me back into Melville:Whether this haggardness had aught to do with criminality could not be determined; since, as intense heat and cold, though unlike, produce like sensations, so innocence and guilt, when, through causal association with mental pain, stamping any visible impress, use one seal - a hacked one. Crossing is track 6 on An Evening of Acoustic Music.
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