An Overview of Langton Hughes Poems

An Overview of Langston Hughes Poems

Langston Hughes was American poet, columnist, playwright and novelist.  Most of his writing focused on the lives of the African Americans; their struggles in a country that was racially divided and where the government on a state and even federal level, did not provide any law to protect them against the injustice that was going on throughout the country.  He promoted a general pride through his writing for being an African American. In one of his short essays The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain he said:

…To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering “I want to be white,” hidden in the aspirations of his people, to “Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro-and beautiful!”

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy

bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

This poem is one of Hughes famous poem.  That poem was first published in Crisis a magazine of the N.A.A.C.P. The editor of the Crisis was W.E.B. Du Bois whom Hughes dedicated the poem to.  In the poem, Hughes used 5 figures of speech; Alliteration, Assonants, Anaphora, Metaphor and Simile; “My soul has grown deep like the rivers…I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young lulled me to sleep, leaving me easy prey…I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep…I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.” The theme of the poem is perseverance.  In spite of suffering inflicted on the African American, the black men and women have endured through the ages, they never gave up.

The poems mentioned four different rivers- Congo, Mississippi, Nile and Euphrates; they each have a connection to African slave.  The Congo River is in Africa, the river flows north in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many Africans were abducted from the Congo region to be sold into slavery. The Mississippi River flows more than 2000 miles from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.  Black slaves labored along its shores and slave auctions took place at towns and settlement within site of the Mississippi.  Abraham Lincoln, while he was visiting New Orleans, he witnessed a slave auction in 1831 and vowed to end slavery. When he became president in 1863, he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves.  The Nile flows northward through Uganda, Sudan, and Egypt.  People of the black race were among those who constructed the pyramids not far from the Nile at Giza, Saqqarah, Dahshur and other sites.  And the Euphrates is one of two great rivers that form in Turkey and flow down through Iraq to Al Qurnah in Southern Iraq. The other river is the Tigris. Records have shown that in the Ancient World that’s where slavery started. Slavery as a result of debt and some African people have had the habit of putting up wives and children as hostages to pay their debts; if the obligation was not met, the hostages became permanent slaves.