we hear the “crazy laughter” as the slaves jump to their deaths in shark-infested water. We can see the sharks tearing at the bodies of the slaves who have jumped overboard.

Different stanzas have different speakers and different points of view. We first have quotation marks around the log book the captain keeps, on this particular ship which sailed in 1800 (this is not the Amistad, which sailed in 1839 and is referred to later in the poem). We have an authorial voice who writes, “Middle Passage: voyage through death to life upon these shores,” which is the theme of the poem. The horror of the Middle Passage did lead to many African slaves having a life upon the shores of the New World, and their descendants having life upon these shores.

We return to the authorial, thematic voice with “Deep in the festering hold thy father lies”—the father of all African Americans descended from slaves who were brought to America to work. We see the New England pews that are made of bones, not wood. The bones of slaves made the church; the altar lights were stolen from light that had been in the slave’s eyes.

Then we have a prayer made perhaps by the sailors on that or another ship, hoping for safe passage, and then another stanza in quotation marks, beginning with “8 bells,” which may be the thoughts of a seaman on the ship. We have a simile—"misfortune follows in our wake like sharks”—so sharks are not the only misfortune affecting the slave ship. The seaman thinks someone must have killed an albatross, which is a reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s long poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The entire imagery of that poem by Coleridge is brought to bear upon this one with this allusion—the imagery of Coleridge’s doomed and damned ship become superimposed upon the images of the slave ship, which is also doomed and damned. We see the image of a blinding disease, opthalmia, spreading, clawing at the eyes of the captain until he is blind too. The seaman invokes the image of slavers “drifting, drifting” when the crew goes blind and “the jungle hatred crawling up on deck.” We see an image of a jungle, full of hatred, crawling—this is how the seaman imagines the black Africans, as something terrifying and unknowable, full of hatred and violence. This image of a frightening savagery alludes to other works of Western European literature: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad comes to mind. If the allusion is successful and you think of (and have read) Heart of Darkness, the entire imagery of that novel intertwines with the imagery of this poem by Hayden, creating yet another ironic theme, for the savagery in Heart of Darkness is the savagery of white men in the jungle, not blacks.

Through imagery, including the imagery of intertextuality, Hayden creates a powerful poem. You can follow the images throughout the entire poem by simply writing down what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch because of the words, and also what you think of when you read the words. For example, “Thou Who Walked on Galilee” refers to Jesus, a man of peace, whom the sailors pray to, but his walking on the waters of Galilee is in direct contrast to the slave ship whipped across the Atlantic with a blind captain, a terrified crew, and Africans insane from their captivity, willing to die to escape their torture in the hold below. When you see the word “Deponent,” you are in a courtroom, where the deponent (the captain) is explaining how the slaves were packed into the hold of the ship—we see the slaves, packed twice as tightly as they were supposed to be because the ship, through someone’s greed, was carrying twice the cargo is was meant to hold. The slaves went “mad with thirst” and “tore their flesh and sucked the blood”—perhaps you can feel the thirst, feel the pain as they bit into their own flesh, taste the blood they tasted to quench their thirst. We learn how on this particular slave ship the crew and captain “lusted with the comeliest” and feel the savagery of the whites as they raped the women slaves, and feel the flames that take over the ship, and smell the burning flesh as the slaves perish in the fire along with the captain. And that’s just Part I of the poem! In Part II we find images of the slave trade in Africa. In Part III we have more images of the slave ships, and then the ironical ending, where, in court, the captain of the Amistad, a ship that was taken over by its slaves, testifies about the mutiny. The courts in America are inclined to release the slaves because the Atlantic slave trade is illegal by the time of the Amistad, but the captain can’t understand why Americans, living in a country founded on slavery, made wealthy by slavery, would see the slaves as anything but chattel to be returned to slavery, or death, in the case of Cinquez, the leader of the slave rebellion onboard the Amistad.