In 'O Daedalus, Fly Away Home’ a Georgia slave clings to his remembrances of Africa and recalls a myth of his 'gran' who 'spread his arms and/ flew away home'.

The poem literally portrays a slave's nostalgia for his homeland. Symbolically Hayden's combining of Greek and African myth employs an image of flight, which becomes in several later poems a figurative expression of a spiritual condition. More specifically flight becomes in Hayden's poetry a symbol of spiritual transcendence and detachment. Significantly, this image of flight is here contemplated during the nighttime.