The Negro Speaks of Rivers

The poem’s narrative structure—with the speaker’s attention moving from river to river, era to era—implies a parallel between rivers and time. Indeed, rivers and time are often compared to one another: Both always steadily flow in one direction. The poem begins at the beginning of the day, at the beginning of time, and opens with the speaker stating he knows rivers that are as old as the earth and older than humanity. He bathed in the oldest river, the Euphrates, “when dawns were young” (Line 4), and by the end of the poem, his chronicle has moved through time and space to the Mississippi, where “its muddy bosom turn[ed] all golden in the sunset” (Line 7) when Abraham Lincoln sailed down the river to New Orleans in the 1800s. Even though this poem covers an expanse of human history, it does so in a way that integrates those expansive elements, as techniques like repetition and parallelism unite the disparate times and locations while the extended metaphor of rivers builds.

Most scholars maintain there is complexity and ambiguity in the poem’s speaker, who is both personal and collective, both literal and figurative, both autobiographical and historical: The poet himself is the speaker insofar as Hughes expresses a sense of personal identity through the poem, yet the “I” transcends his individual voice, and the journey depicted is not his own literal experience. The poem is titled “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and Hughes seems to be using the singular noun “Negro” to represent all people throughout history who have the shared experience of being Black. This interpretation is also germane to the language of the era, during which (and for many decades after) people often referred to “the negro” as shorthand for the entire Black population. While white society has, historically, often used such generalizing language to stereotype and depersonalize Black individuals, Hughes reappropriates the term and gives it power through the wisdom and depth of his poem’s speaker.

Hughes opens the poem with this depiction of great wisdom and experience, suggesting that his people have a deeper connection to the world than anyone, as he has known rivers “older than the flow of human blood in human veins” (Line 2). And by pairing this in the next line with “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” (Line 3), Hughes further characterizes his speaker by showing his vast perspective. The idea of depth is also important, as it includes both depth of knowledge and depth of experience, which will feature in the next part of the poem.

As the poem spans throughout time, it highlights major moments in the history of Black experience throughout the world. The reference to the Euphrates, and to the dawn of humanity, reminds readers that life began in Africa and that civilization began in West Asia (a close migration point from northeast Africa). At the time and locale of the poem’s composition, white society’s prevailing “wisdom” was that all of humanity’s important artistic and technological progress had come from white people. This myth of uniquely-white ingenuity is blatantly erroneous for many reasons, among the most fundamental being that agriculture and civilization itself began in a geographic area not populated by white people. This data has particularly ironic value considering that a common racist practice of Hughes’s time was to call Black people “uncivilized.”

The poem then moves to Africa as the speaker paints pictures of two more great rivers: the Congo and the Nile. The line about the Congo presents a peaceful image of sleep by the river. This is, again, a bit ironic, as the Congo became an important river in the American slave trade. This suggests that the speaker recalls a time before colonization and slavery when the land of his ancestors was a safe home and not to be feared. Likewise, the image of raising the pyramids above the Nile shows two things. First, the idea ties to the innovation and marvel of the Egyptian civilization. The pyramids are among the oldest extant human-made structures, and they are world-renowned as epitomizing civilization, beauty, and strength. Second, the pyramids introduce even more irony into the poem by showing how, once again, it was not Europeans who created these monuments of civilization, but Africans. While the poem is not necessarily concerned with using irony to make political points, the implication is clear: Despite the contemporary white society’s rhetoric, Africans have been responsible for some of the most iconic, enduring, and beautiful things the world has ever seen.

Finally, the speaker remarks on a less distant past—in America. When he references Lincoln going down the Mississippi toward New Orleans, he is referring to a trip during which the young Lincoln first witnessed the horrors of slavery; from that point on, Lincoln abhorred the practice and believed it to be inhumane. This would prove vital, as he would later sign the Emancipation Proclamation when he was President of the United States, abolishing slavery in the then-Confederate states and setting up the complete abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War. Hughes hints at this hopeful moment in history by describing the water as turning from muddy to golden in the sun. This final image gives the poem a hopeful tone.

The poem’s journey through these rivers leads to a climax where the speaker repeats his declaration that “[his] soul has grown deep like the rivers” (Line 10). This conclusion, along with the vast journey the poem depicts, demonstrates the resiliency, strength, and collective experience of Black people—yet the line is also a bit ambivalent. Such a deep soul suggests experience and strength, but it also suggests having seen many things, and not all of them necessarily good. Such depth entails seriousness and earned wisdom; it suggests complication and highlights the complexity of experience. The speaker declares that this history has, for those who share it, created a kind of inner strength and perspective. Ultimately, this gives the poem a hopeful, if not a bit ambivalent, message about collective history, strength, and perseverance.