Essay Notes on The immortal human wish
The immortal human wish is liberty, freedom and the pursuit of happiness. These words were on the Declaration of Independence, and they are just as true today as when they were first written. It’s easy to talk about freedom, but freedom isn’t always free. The poet Robert Hayden recognizes this when he writes of the fight for freedom being a “voyage through death to life upon these shores.”
A voyage through death doesn’t have to mean dying; it can also mean an experience that brings someone close to death. Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine were close to the reality of death because they were at war; in their case it was the American Revolution. Both of them, however, saw the necessity of death as part of the goal of gaining freedom or independence from Great Britain.
Patrick Henry wrote “give me liberty or give me death.” He clearly understood the stakes involved, but he was willing to take a voyage through death, or to go to war, to achieve the goal of freedom. He would have rather to have died than to live in bondage to England.
Thomas Paine didn’t shrink from the possibility of death either. He decided that it would be shameful to compromise with the British in order to live a life in subjection to the crown.
Both of these men were white men who owned land. At least one of them, Patrick Henry, owned slaves. In fact, many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves, including the writer of the Declaration himself, Thomas Jefferson.
This irony of history, that so many of the founders of the nation, men who believed in the ideals of all men having a right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” could enslave other human beings is something Robert Hayden, the poet, is very aware of when he writes,
The deep immortal human wish,
the timeless will:…
Voyage through death
to life upon these shores.
The “deep immortal human wish,” is among other things a metaphor for the wish to live freely and to be able to be happy. To achieve that wish, however, sometimes people have to suffer, or even go through a “voyage of death,” to arrive at “life upon these shores.” This means that sometimes people have to go through a terrible trial, possibly even risking death, to get their immortal human wish.
For the patriots of the American Revolutionthat we have read about this year, “A voyage through death,” or the willingness to risk death by war was a necessary sacrifice to achieve “life upon these shores,” which for them meant independence. The same desire for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, however, was the deepest wish of the slaves on the slaveships, including the Amistad.
The poem, “Middle Passage,” tells the story of the conditions on slave ships traveling from West Africa to the Caribbean. These were ships of death to the slaves being transported from their homes of freedom to lives of suffering and misery in the Americas, where there would be no freedom or happiness. Many blacks died on these ships or leaped to their deaths in the ocean, rather than suffer in chains. So too, the poem describes in horrifying detail, the consequences of being on those ships:
A charnel stenchthe smell of death, effluvium of living death
spreads outward from the hold, [which means it spreads from the bottom of the ship where the slaves are]
where the living and the dead, the horribly dying,
lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement.
Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,[festering means running and pus-like like an infected sore]
the corpse of mercy rots with him,
rats eat love’s rotten gelid eyes.
But, oh, the living look at you [this is the narrator of the poem saying the blacks who are in chains look at their captors through human eyes filled with hate.]
with human eyes whose suffering accuses you,
whose hatred reaches through the swill of dark
to strike you like a leper’s claw.
You cannot stare that hatred down
or chain the fear that stalks the watches
and breathes on you its fetid scorching breath;
cannot kill the deep immortal human wish,
the timeless will.
The hatred comes from the evil slave traders having taken from the blacks what they wouldn’t want taken from themselves—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Re-read this essay and then write your essay, using The Patrick Henry Speech to the Virginia Convention, The Declaration of Independence, and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. In your essay, be sure to think about whether the metaphor of a “voyage through death” is positive, negative or both.
Sah’liek needs to complete the three assigned packets. All of his grades for these represent partial points because he either didn’t hand them in, or he didn’t complete the work. For