In a burst of youthful genius, Hughes wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” when he was only 20 years old, at the height of Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement. It mimics Sandburg in its omnipresent first-person speaker. The persistent parallel observations—for example, “I bathed,” “I built,” “I looked,” “I heard”—survey Asian, African, and North American scenes over millennia as though a single long-lived observer relished the beauties of each. Rich with a distilled wisdom, the poem turns on an image in lines 2 and 3 that merges flowing waters with the human circulatory system. The muddy depths are the primal source of rebirth, both for the speaker and the budding poet.
Without naming the hardships of the black race, Hughes epitomizes the speaker’s peaceful, life-affirming experiences as a parallel of the sun’s daily cycle. Life as a black has benefited the speaker, who claims “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” The image suggests that historical events and the cyclical rise of civilizations have amassed an invaluable heritage. The speaker’s depth of soul is the strength that stabilizes black people, who survive weather shifts in world power as easily as water flows to the sea.
In 1926, the poet wrote one of his most compressed, lyrically self-expressive poems, “Dream Variation.” An intensely physical image of spontaneous, joyful whirling and dancing in sunlight gives place to a symbolic night, which brings rest, cool, and a subtly powerful reminder that darkness and blackness are his birthright and the source of his creativity. A three-syllable beat buoys the speaker into a second verse. In rhapsodic mode, the dancer again gyrates in sunlight and into the shady darkness, which tenderly enfolds the body at rest into a reassuring blackness. Hughes’s final line, “Black like me,” was an awakening to people hungry for a reason to take pride in self. The phrase served as the title of Richard Wright’s autobiography.
At the crest of his poetic powers, Hughes crafted “The Weary Blues,” a deliberately winsome, vernacular hymn to a Lenox Avenue jazz pianist. Like a Scott Joplin rag, the poem melds African rhythms and themes with European verse traditions. Lightly, almost fondly, it illuminates old-style complacence. Like a dismal dog, the player sounds out old woes and thumps the floor with his foot as heavenly lights wink out. By early morning, the pianist, dreaming his bluesy theme song, lies moribund, as lifeless as a rock or corpse.
The controlled artistry of the poem summons blues syncopation and repetitions, linking lines with a loose rhyme scheme comprised of simple monosyllables—for example, tune/croon, play/sway, and night/light. At high points in the development, the poet moves to a dominance of oo and ooh sounds. The subdued sound, like a jazz lament, overwhelms the text with a self-induced inertia that condemns the singer for his soul-paralyzing melancholy, the result of a lifelong indulgence in self-pity.
In 1927, Hughes perpetuated his music-based verse in “Song for a Dark Girl,” a twelve-line ditty that develops a keen-edged irony through repetitions of “Way Down South in Dixie,” the closing line of the Confederacy’s unofficial national anthem. Stoutly rhythmic, the three-beat lines alternate feminine and masculine rhymes of Dixie/me to land firm-footed on the monosyllabic “tree,” a fusion of the lover’s lynching site with a symbol—”wood”—which stands for the device on which Christ was executed. The intense wordplay links “cross roads” with the Christian cross; alliteration unifies “gnarled and naked” for a stark picture of Southern injustice in an area also famed as the Bible Belt, center of fundamentalist religion.
An example of Hughes’s easy conversational mode and lithe tone, “Madam’s Calling Cards” (1949), depicts a woman in conference with a printer about an order for personal cards. Her surname, Johnson, is common among black Americans; Alberta is a favorite female given name. Both appear alongside an honorific, “Madam,” which the printer approves. Misunderstanding his question about which font to use, Old English or Roman, she asserts that she is completely American and wants nothing foreign appended to her heritage. Beyond the lighthearted exchange, Hughes implies that the speaker, presumably a strong black woman, has paid dearly for her nationality, which derives from enslaved African forebears.
Late in Hughes’s poetic growth, he composed “Harlem,” a crisp, bleak succession of rhetorical questions about oppression. Opening on a series of alliterated d sounds, he inquires about the effects of suppressed artistry and self-expression. His deceptively simple parallelism begins with an image of a crinkling raisin, a putrescent sore, and reeking rotted meat, then retreats to a less loathsome vision of a sweet, a symbol of black behaviors that mask mounting discontent with sugary manners. Abruptly, Hughes shifts the rhythm and rhyme of his brief ten lines to a vision of a sagging burden. He concludes with a single question in italics—an ominous warning that Harlemites are capable of postponing dreams, but may someday lose control to erupt in riot and rebellion.
