Weird Harold
Opinionated Old Fart
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2000
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runagate - noun archaic a person who has defected
Interesting word -- as one might expect, it is related to Renegade; both being derived from the latin Renegatus.
With fortuitous timing, it is also the title of a poem relevant to Black History Month:
Runagate Runagate by Robert Hayden
"Runagate Runagate," an archaic expression for a runaway slave, opens with especially keen heights of dramatic tension that bring alive the sense of dangerous enterprise and desperate, breathless, and uneven flight that the runaway slaves must have experienced:
Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness
and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror
and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing
and the night cold and the night long and the river
to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning
and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere
morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on
going
Runagate
Runagate
Runagate
...
From Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry. Copyright © 1987 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.