Langston hughes the negro speaks of river

Hughes uses the literary elements of repetition and simile to paint the river as a symbol of timelessness. This is evident in the first two lines of the poem. The speaker makes the reader aware that he is speaking from one time looking back at another. The land surface from which a river system collects water is called a watershed or catchment area. Surface water is any body of water above ground, including streams, rivers, lakes, wetlands, reservoirs, and creeks. The ocean, despite being saltwater, is also considered surface water.

===

We are searching data for your request:

Wait the end of the search in all databases.
Upon completion, a link will appear to access the found materials.

Content:

• The Negro Speaks of Rivers Poetry Response
• PoetAndPoem.Com
• LotsOfEssays.com
• What does the river symbolize in Langston Hughes The Negro Speaks of Rivers?
• The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes - Essay Example
• The Poems (We Think) We Know: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes
• Analysis of ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ by Langston Hughes
• What literary devices are used in the Negro Speaks of Rivers?

WATCH RELATED VIDEO: Langston Hughes reads The Negro Speaks of Rivers

The Negro Speaks of Rivers Poetry Response

Having recently graduated from high school, he was on a train heading to Mexico City, where he would spend just over a year with his father, a man he barely knew. Louis when inspiration struck:. 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. While Hughes would one day travel widely and eventually spend significant time in France, Haiti, the former Soviet Union, Netherlands, and Africa, when he wrote this poem he was emerging from a distinctly Midwestern childhood.

He would move to New York City the city with which he would come to be associated to attend Columbia University the year after writing this poem, but at the moment of its composition, it was the landscape of the Midwest that he knew best. Yet this poem declares itself to be spoken by someone whose knowledge is as ancient as the rivers of which he speaks.

This is not, in other words, the story of a teenager just setting out on a journey across the middle of America.

Louis, crossing the Mississippi as he heads towards Mexico — when we look at it more closely, certain questions arise. Could one actually travel by train from St. Louis to Mexico in ? If so, what route would one take — would Hughes, for example, have been pulling out of St. Louis or pulling into it when he wrote the poem?

And on which side of the Mississippi would he be traveling as he made his way down to Mexico? If I could figure out exactly where Hughes was, maybe I would understand the poem better. Maybe unsurprisingly, no book or article on Langston Hughes that I consulted and I read many of them! By now, his story is famous, but it turns out that, in our repetition of it, we have totally overlooked its details.

Although I had moments when I wanted to give up on what seemed like a wild goose chase for information that might not affect my reading of this poem in the slightest, I stuck with it, as I have a good amount of experience trying to figure out the most obscure facts about poems and their poets.

This puzzle remains unsolved. Success came from the most unlikely of sources: an undergraduate student. Well, actually, her father. When I expressed a kind of mild frustration that I might never figure out how he actually got from point A to point B, this particular student asked me if she could text her dad, since she was sure he would know.

One of them included the train schedule for the Missouri Pacific Lines. This particular schedule was from , although my source from the railroad says that this line, which is now no longer in use, was up and running in Louis , and was crossing over the Mississippi on either the MacArthur or the Merchants Bridge, just before landing in Union Station and boarding the next train.

That next train would take him through, among other places, Bismarck, Poplar Bluff, Little Rock, and Texarkana, keeping him far west of the Mississippi for the rest of his journey south. Knowing this allows me to know two more things: One is that Hughes was not traveling down the Mississippi the way Lincoln is in his poem. But this is a fiction, as Hughes himself is not that liberator — he is, in fact, heading west, out of what were once border states and into slave states, into land not water upon which some of the worst battles of the Civil War were fought.

Hughes barely knew James N. Hughes, although he had spent some time with him the year prior to the Mexico trip. But maybe more importantly, Hughes and his father held drastically different ideas about race.

I think he hated himself, too, for being a Negro. He disliked all of his family because they were Negroes. It is a message that, he would come to find, poetry was particularly suited to convey.

The Mississippi is the only one of the four rivers featured in this poem that Hughes had actually seen. So why these four rivers? If these rivers mean the same thing in this poem — if clustering them in this way culminates in a message — it is unclear exactly what that message is.

The four rivers referenced in this poem reside in three different continents. Each empties into a different body of water, and each has a clear but different historical and symbolic association for most readers. The Euphrates, which begins in eastern Turkey and flows through Syria and Iraq, and eventually into the Persian Gulf, is the longest river in western Asia. In the case of the Congo, it is the sound of this deep river that ushers in sleep. Things get more complicated as we move to the Nile and the Mississippi, as both rivers are strongly associated with slavery and the related issues of labor, persecution, and politics that Hughes conjures up.

As the narrator of the poem single-handedly raises the pyramids above the Nile which runs from Uganda into the Mediterranean Sea , he both invokes and erases 1, years of slavery in Egypt.

Whereas the line about the Nile is peopled by one person who stands in for many , the line about the Mississippi allows us to see and hear slaves en masse. Here, Hughes recalls the most recent moment of, we might say, a civilization at unrest. On the one hand, the progression from the Euphrates to the Mississippi tells an all-too-natural history from birth to death, from an unpeopled world to a peopled one, from the sun rising to the sun setting.

In doing so, it tracks the movement from innocence to tragedy, from water thought to be divine to water that contains the blood of slaves. For instance, although the Euphrates and the Mississippi come first and last, they both represent the fall of certain kinds of empires.

Reading the list this way makes it hard to superimpose a developmental narrative on it. In fact, what Hughes tells us about these rivers collectively — that they are old — may be just as important as what he tells us about their individual identities. They may also be beautiful or wild or dangerous or useful, but first and foremost they are old. And in being old, they embody ancient knowledge of the human and geographical sort.

While rivers are often thought to mark boundaries, they also make movement of both goods and people possible. Stories move forward and then wrap back around on themselves. And when this happens, their essence, their moral content, and their potential symbolism can be hard to locate. Because The Crisis was the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, it makes sense that the images of African Americans the world over, united by industry, triumph, and tragedy, would greatly appeal to its readership.

And indeed it was very popular. But between this moment of initial enchantment with a new voice in , and the moment when Hughes published the poem again — this time in his first book, The Weary Blues , in People thought of Hughes as the poet of social progress, and the poems contained in The Weary Blues identified him with other ambitions, namely, the desire to give voice to the rhythms and songs of the African-American community. This was a new aesthetic, an aesthetic to which many people were resistant, for its politics were not as clear and its message not as tidy.

To some, the fact that his poems sang through individual blues players and community members meant that the poems were not radical enough, because they did an inadequate job of advancing and uniting the community. History must flow on. When we think Hughes is heading south, he is actually heading west. A racist father waits to greet the young man who will become the greatest poet of the Harlem Renaissance. A poem lands twice upon a quickly changing readership.

Each journey requires us to look harder, to investigate its details, to get off the train and look around ourselves before we get back on. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. But between this moment of initial enchantment with a new voice in , and the moment when Hughes published the poem again — this time in his first book, The Weary Blues , in — the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing and both the aesthetics and the politics of the establishment had shifted.

PoetAndPoem.Com

One of the key poems of a literary movement called the "Harlem Renaissance," "The Negro Speaks of River" traces black history from the beginning of human civilization to the present, encompassing both triumphs like the construction of the Egyptian pyramids and horrors like American slavery. The poem argues that the black "soul" has incorporated all of this historical experience, and in the process has become "deep. 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. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

LotsOfEssays.com

Once upon a time I wrote a truly useful post on ekphrasis, and what it is, and rather than copy it here, I'll just direct you there though I…. It's the first Friday in the month of July tomorrow , so I'm posting my poem written in tandem with my lovely poetry sisters. This month it's…. Oh my! This month, it's skinny poems. The rules of…. Anonymous comments are disabled in this journal. Your IP address will be recorded. Recommend this entry Has been recommended Send news.

What does the river symbolize in Langston Hughes The Negro Speaks of Rivers?

Margaret Bonds. The poem considers the contemporary African American experience alongside the ancient, shared memories of African peoples, tracing their connection to rivers on both continents. Du Bois. Characteristic of her approach to art songs, Bonds evokes the meaning of her text in both the melody and the accompaniment, often playing one off the other.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes - Essay Example

Despite Hughes's relative lack of real-world experience, the work embodies a wisdom and cultural awareness far beyond the poet's years. The poem's narrator evokes images that span thousands of years and thousands of miles, relating the experiences of all black people throughout history to himself in his present day. Hughes wrote the poem while traveling by train across the Mississippi River on a trip to Mexico. The beauty of the hour and the setting—the great muddy river glinting in the sun, the banked and tinted summer clouds, the rush of the train toward the dark, all touched an adolescent sensibility tender after the gloomy day. The sense of beauty and death, of hope and despair, fused in his imagination.

The Poems (We Think) We Know: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes

Where are Langston Hughes remains today? What literary devices are used in the Negro Speaks of Rivers? Langston Hughes poems served as a voice for all African Americans greatly throughout his living life, and even after his death. How is symbolism used in the Negro Speaks of Rivers? Hughes uses the literary elements of repetition and simile to paint the river as a symbol of timelessness. This is evident in the first two lines of the poem. How does I respond to Whitman?

Analysis of ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ by Langston Hughes

For many years, he lived an unsettled life. His father deserted the family while Langston was still an infant. Langston was sent to Lawrence, Kansas, to be raised by his grandmother. When he reached adolescence, he rejoined his mother and her new husband, now living in Lincoln, Illinois, but soon to relocate to Cleveland, where Langston attended high school.

What literary devices are used in the Negro Speaks of Rivers?

Langston Hughes was an African American poet who made poetry that reflected what he witnessed in the urban communities throughout his life. Though bi-racial, Langston Hughes knew very clearly what was. Langston Hughes and His Harlem Dream An explosion of written and artistic creativity, a time of social awareness and enlightenment among the black race. As more blacks made Harlem their home, it increasingly became well known as an African. Many Southern African-Americans migrated to a place called Harlem and this is where the Harlem renaissance originated from.

Add to list. Langston Hughes Follow. 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.

With those two main focuses highlighted throughout each poem, it creates an intriguing idea for a reader to comprehend. In the world of literature, and poetry in particular, new personalities appeared. Langston Hughes is believed to be one of the most prominent poets and thinkers of his age. In the 19th century the prevalence of slavery had a major impact on the lives of many.