18 pages • 36 minutes read
Langston HughesThe Negro Speaks of Rivers
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1921A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Celebrating Black Lineage and Identity
Hughes’s poem focuses on major moments of success, innovation, and promise in history to trace the legacy of his people. Hughes establishes this early in the poem with the image of human blood in human veins: Just as human blood flows through the body, the rivers flow through time, and just as all humans share the same blood, these rivers share the same waters. The imagery draws a connection between the earliest civilizations in Asia and the modern world in North America by showing how, just like the different parts of a river, all experience is connected in some way.
Hughes also focuses on positive imagery to celebrate the lineage he is identifying. He does not talk about slavery, racism, segregation, or the other negative experiences imposed upon Black people during his time. While such suffering is connoted by the geographic locations and the language in the poem, it is not the poem’s focus. Instead, Hughes highlights the great successes of his lineage: From the emergence of agriculture and civilization in Mesopotamia to the raising of the pyramids in Egypt to the abolition of slavery in the 1800s, he focuses on the points in the river that left lasting positive impacts on the present. These moments’ triumph is reinforced by the image of the muddy water turning golden in the sun, suggesting that the pain and suffering of the past will one day give way to the warmth and life of the future.
Determination and Perseverance
Hughes focuses on positive imagery partly because he wishes to present a message of determination and perseverance. He does this by building himself up from an individual to part of a greater tradition of innovators and builders, and he invokes thousands of years of his forebears’ strength on his journey. Hughes wrote the poem while traveling south on the Mississippi, and enduring such a journey by himself when he was only 17 would have been terrifying, especially in light of the elevated racial tensions that had exploded just a year earlier. Nevertheless, instead of viewing the water as something to be feared (as one might have expected, considering the Mississippi River fed directly into the Jim Crow South), the young poet conjures the collective memory of his lineage as he compares his soul to the rivers he has just described as life-giving and central to his ancestral experience.
In drawing upon this collective experience, identity, and wisdom, Hughes creates an empowering voice that transcends his own individuality and can speak for all who share his struggle. He is not alone: He can persevere because his lineage gives him perseverance; he can have determination because his forebears had determination; he can succeed because those who came before him also succeeded. This message flows with the metaphor of the rivers because they, too, have seen this extensive history and have persevered through it all. Rivers are nothing but determined. They carve through the land and expand over time, undeterred by any obstacle.
Deconstructing the White Man’s Burden
In 1899, British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem called “The White Man’s Burden,” essentially arguing that it was white people’s responsibility to engage in the imperialism of non-white countries. Kipling’s poem argues that white people have a burden to bring “civilization” to those he describes as “[h]alf devil and half child” (Kipling, Line 8). This was a common sentiment among colonists, who believed that any non-white peoples either were akin to children who existed in a lesser-evolutionary state, or were “savages” who needed to be civilized with European values and religion.
This idea persisted well into the 20th century, and Hughes’s poem counters it in a powerful way by rejecting its classification of Black people and showing the complex and deep history of his people throughout the world. The poem uses irony to point out how non-white people have been responsible in numerous important ways, since antiquity, for innovation and progress—for civilization itself. The poem also counters colonialist attitudes by rejecting the traditional European structural elements. Hughes writes neither in a set meter nor with an established rhyme scheme, and he eschews common elements like alliteration. Instead, he writes in free verse (which was relatively new at the time) and relies on anaphora and vivid similes that invoke a style similar to ancient oral traditions like those behind the Bible, in which many stories were circulated by word of mouth long before they were written down.
Related Titles
By Langston Hughes
