the angers of that house

One of the most famous and widely anthologized American poems of the twentieth century is Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” Whenever I read it I always note one curious phrase, a gentle and generous evasion: “slowly I would rise and dress, / fearing the chronic angers of that house.” The evasion, of course, is this: Houses are not angry.

The man we know as Robert Hayden was born in Detroit in 1913 and named Asa Bundy Sheffey. His parents, Asa and Ruth Sheffey, separated soon after his birth, or maybe even before — evidence about his early years is sketchy — and left him in the care of neighbors, William and Sue Ellen Hayden, who renamed him Robert Earl Hayden. Later in life he would learn that they never formally adopted him. It appears that William and Sue Ellen fought constantly — Hayden believed that his foster mother had never ceased to love her first husband, to whom she had borne three children, and that was one of the points of conflict — but he was not exempt from their rages. As an adult he said, simply, that they “didn’t know how to handle children.” This was generous: he once said, more bluntly, “Worse than the poverty were the conflicts, the quarreling, the tensions that kept us most of the time on the edge of some shrill domestic calamity. We had a terrible love-hate relationship with one another, and dreadful things happened I can never forget.” And: “I was often abused and often hurt physically.”

That abuse is depicted in his shattering poem “The Whipping.” The poem begins in the third person, as we see a terrified small boy being chased around the yard by a large woman bearing a stick: “She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling / boy till the stick breaks / in her hand” … but then, as the boy curls himself into a ball of ineffectual self-protection, shifts into the first person, depicting “My head gripped in bony vise / of knees,” and then what that boy, the poet, the teller of his own misery, saw: “the face that I / no longer knew or loved.”

Hayden’s bookish introversion — evident from early on, and intensified by extremely poor eyesight that made sports and games impossible for him — was incomprehensible to his foster father and, it seems, also to his natural father when he briefly met with that man at age twelve. He found refuge only in books, and especially in the poetry he read and, later, wrote. His foster parents apparently came to understand that a life of learning was the only reasonable path for him, and supported his study at Detroit City College. From there he went on to graduate study at the University of Michigan, where he fell under the influence, and experienced the encouragement of, a professor who taught there for only a short time: W. H. Auden.

It is noteworthy that when he recollects the terrors and miseries of his upbringing in verse — however he may have spoken of them in other venues — Hayden always seeks some reconciling vision, some expansive comprehension. He concludes “The Whipping” by showing us not the boy but the one who whipped him:

And the woman leans muttering against
a tree, exhausted, purged —
avenged in part for lifelong hidings
she has had to bear.

And whatever his foster father did to him — surely things as bad as his foster mother did — in “Those Winter Sundays” he chooses not to ignore “the chronic angers” of his family but to displace them to the house itself, relieving his foster parents of the burden of them, so that he can remember more clearly something that was also true: that his father faithfully performed some, at least, of “love’s austere and lonely offices.”

It’s a generosity of spirit greater than anyone could ever demand; greater than we could ever expect. But all the more awe-inspiring for that.

Sources:

The brief bio at poets.org

The brief bio at Lift Every Voice

Edward Hirsch, “A Reckoning and a Testimonial: On Robert Hayden’s ‘The Whipping’”

Brian Short, “Robert Hayden: Ascent and Repose”