Let America Be America Again What Type of Poem Is the Negro Speaks of Rivers

As LANGSTON HUGHES TELLS Information technology, he wrote "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (at present ane of his almost famous and widely anthologized poems) when he was just 17. Having recently graduated from high school, he was on a train heading to Mexico Urban center, where he would spend just over a year with his male parent, a man he barely knew. In his narration of this verse form'due south scene of composition — you can mind to information technology here — Hughes says that he was crossing the Mississippi just exterior of St. Louis when inspiration struck:

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
period of homo blood in homo veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I congenital my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to slumber.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above information technology.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went downwards to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom plow all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

While Hughes would one 24-hour interval travel widely and eventually spend significant time in French republic, Haiti, the onetime Soviet Matrimony, Netherlands, and Africa, when he wrote this poem he was emerging from a distinctly Midwestern childhood. He was born in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in various places in Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio. He would motility to New York Metropolis (the metropolis with which he would come to exist associated) to attend Columbia University the year afterwards writing this verse form, but at the moment of its limerick, it was the landscape of the Midwest that he knew best. Yet this poem declares itself to be spoken past someone whose knowledge is as aboriginal as the rivers of which he speaks. In other words, this is an old "Negro," someone returned from a journey (or many journeys) around the globe, someone whose soul has had fourth dimension to "abound deep as the rivers" that he has known intimately. This is not, in other words, the story of a teenager just setting out on a journey across the heart of America.

Every bit I contemplated this seeming disjunction between Hughes the teenage poet and his aged, wise, Negro speaker, I found myself stuck in Hughes's story of the poem'due south composition. While Hughes tells the story with much certainty — that, at the moment of the verse form'southward inspiration, he is only outside of St. Louis, crossing the Mississippi as he heads towards Mexico — when nosotros look at it more closely, certain questions ascend. Could one actually travel by train from St. Louis to Mexico in 1920? If so, what route would one take — would Hughes, for example, accept 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? Because Hughes himself makes so much out of this romantic scene of his teenage self writing the poem, I couldn't help, while writing this column, but at least endeavor to answer these questions. If I could figure out exactly where Hughes was, peradventure I would understand the verse form better.

Possibly unsurprisingly, no volume or article on Langston Hughes that I consulted (and I read many of them!) could tell me the route that Hughes traveled to Mexico. By now, his story is famous, only it turns out that, in our repetition of it, we have totally overlooked its details. Although I had moments when I wanted to requite upwardly on what seemed like a wild goose hunt for information that might non affect my reading of this poem in the slightest, I stuck with it, every bit I have a proficient amount of experience trying to figure out the nigh obscure facts about poems and their poets. (I once spent the better part of a calendar week trying to effigy out how coconuts made their way into Emily Dickinson'south home in the 1860s. This puzzle remains unsolved.)

Success came from the about unlikely of sources: an undergraduate student. Well, really, her begetter. One day a few weeks ago, we were talking about this poem in my "Introduction to American Literature" course, when I decided to tell my class that I had become interested in Hughes'south trivial story about train travel. 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 item student asked me if she could text her dad, since she was sure he would know. Off went her text and I didn't give it another thought until that afternoon when I received multiple emails from a homo I didn't know. Ane of them included the train schedule for the Missouri Pacific Lines.

This particular schedule was from 1966, although my source from the railroad says that this line, which is now no longer in employ, was up and running in 1920. If Hughes's facts are in fact correct and he has non misremembered the details of that solar day, and then, in all likelihood, he was just concluding the first leg of his trip (the 560 miles from Cleveland to St. Louis), and was crossing over the Mississippi on either the MacArthur or the Merchants Bridge, just earlier landing in Marriage Station and boarding the next railroad train. That next railroad train would take him through, among other places, Bismarck, Poplar Bluff, Lilliputian Stone, and Texarkana, keeping him far west of the Mississippi for the rest of his journeying southward.

Knowing this allows me to know two more things: Ane is that Hughes was not traveling downward the Mississippi the way Lincoln is in his verse form. Past catastrophe on that prototype of Lincoln traveling into the sounds of the river (which I accept to exist woven through with the songs of slaves), Hughes allows the poem's speaker and reader to travel there too, condign, in a sense, some version of an American liberator. But this is a fiction, as Hughes himself is non that liberator — he is, in fact, heading west, out of what were once border states and into slave states, into land (non h2o) upon which some of the worst battles of the Civil State of war were fought. The other thing that Hughes's railroad train travel allows me to remember is that Mexico is an intrinsic part of this poem's story. Waiting for Hughes in Mexico was Hughes's estranged begetter, whom he would live with for i year. Hughes writes the poem on the back on an envelope that holds one of his father'due south messages and, in this way, the poem becomes not just a poem about traveling towards his begetter but a class of communication, albeit not a direct conversation, with that begetter.

Hughes'south mother and father separated before long later his birth, and Hughes was raised by his mother and a number of her family members. Hughes barely knew James N. Hughes, although he had spent some time with him the year prior to the Mexico trip. At this moment of traveling towards his begetter, Hughes probably didn't know the extent to which he and his male parent were so different, merely glimmers of this knowledge are present in the act of writing this poem. For ane thing, Hughes's father would come up to be discouraging of his son'south want to write poetry. Simply maybe more importantly, Hughes and his father held drastically different ideas near race. The perspective of Hughes'due south father ran directly counter to the celebratory and romantic vision that Hughes presents in his poem — a vision of African Americans as makers and speakers of history. Later, Hughes would describe how he had contemplated his father's dissonant attitude, right before the trip to Mexico: "I had been thinking about my begetter and his strange dislike of his own people. I didn't sympathise it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much." Even more strongly, Hughes once said that his male parent "hated Negroes. I think he hated himself, besides, for existence a Negro. He disliked all of his family because they were Negroes."

As Hughes makes his way into this spider web of issues — familial, racial, professional person — that resides in Mexico, he writes a quiet, wise declaration of the African-American community'due south age-sometime humanity. Information technology is a message that, he would come to find, poetry was particularly suited to convey.

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Stranger, perhaps, than Hughes's confusing rendition of travel past country, is this poem'due south attention to a variety of dissimilar kinds of rivers. The Mississippi is the only one of the four rivers featured in this verse form that Hughes had actually seen. So why these 4 rivers? If these rivers mean the same affair in this poem — if clustering them in this mode culminates in a message — it is unclear exactly what that message is.

The iv rivers referenced in this poem reside in three different continents. Each empties into a different body of water, and each has a articulate (but dissimilar) 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 southwest asia. The earliest references to the Euphrates are dated around 3500 BCE, near the very first of culture, or, as Hughes's poem says, "when dawns were immature." The Euphrates may exist the oldest river, just the Congo is the deepest, making its style through 11 African countries earlier emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. Hughes presents the positive effect of both of these rivers on the verse form'south speaker. In the case of the Congo, it is the sound of this deep river that ushers in slumber.

Things get more complicated as we movement 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. In both cases, Hughes transforms this slavery through the poem'due south knowing. As the narrator of the verse form unmarried-handedly raises the pyramids above the Nile (which runs from Uganda into the Mediterranean Body of water), he both invokes and erases i,000 years of slavery in Arab republic of egypt. Whereas the line nearly the Nile is peopled by one person (who stands in for many), the line nigh the Mississippi allows u.s.a. to encounter (and hear) slaves en masse. Here, Hughes recalls the most recent moment of, we might say, a civilisation at unrest.

On the one hand, the progression from the Euphrates to the Mississippi tells an all-too-natural history (from nascence to death, from an unpeopled earth to a peopled one, from the lord's day 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 claret of slaves. But even if we desire to map this narrative onto the move from 1 river to the next, it doesn't work seamlessly. For instance, although the Euphrates and the Mississippi come up get-go and last, they both stand for 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 every bit what he tells u.s. about their private identities. They may also be cute or wild or unsafe or useful, only beginning and foremost they are old. And in beingness old, they embody ancient noesis of the human and geographical sort.

While rivers are often thought to marking boundaries, they likewise make movement (of both goods and people) possible. Because the stories that these rivers tell do not move in one clear direction, Hughes shows us that the history of the world'southward people does not flow in one direction either. Stories motion forward and then wrap dorsum around on themselves. And when this happens, their essence, their moral content, and their potential symbolism tin be hard to locate.

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While the dissimilar scenes inside this verse form return moments across a huge swath of historical time, the story of this poem'south life in print is oddly dependent on a very specific historical moment. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was published the year after Hughes wrote it, in the June 1921 upshot of Westward. Due east. B. DuBois'southward journal, The Crisis. Because The Crunch was the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, information technology makes sense that the images of African Americans the world over, united by manufacture, triumph, and tragedy, would greatly entreatment to its readership. And indeed it was very popular. It is rumored that when the poem arrived at the magazine, DuBois said to Jessie Fauset, "What colored person is there, do you suppose, in the United states who writes like that and is yet unknown to usa?" This story may requite you a sense of merely how interested the current literary establishment was in Hughes and why he was and so easily taken nether its wing.

But betwixt this moment of initial enchantment with a new vocalism in 1921, and the moment when Hughes published the verse form again — this fourth dimension in his first volume, The Weary Blues, in 1926

— the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing and both the aesthetics and the politics of the establishment had shifted. While some people marking the publication of this book as the kickoff of Hughes's career, he had already published many poems (many through Fauset, who was a huge supporter of his work) between 1921 and 1926. And, past 1926, the unanimous back up he received in the early 1920s had become tempered slightly by some of the African-American literary community's objections to the jazz and blues poems included in his starting time volume.

People thought of Hughes as the poet of social progress, and the poems independent in The Weary Blues identified him with other ambitions, namely, the desire to give voice to the rhythms and songs of the African-American customs. This was a new aesthetic, an aesthetic to which many people were resistant, for its politics were not as clear and its message not every bit tidy. To some, the fact that his poems sang through private blues players and community members meant that the poems were not radical enough, because they did an inadequate task of advancing and uniting the community. Within five short years, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" went from being the first and wholly unexpected verse form past a young stranger, to existence one of many poems by a man to whom the African-American community looked for representation and guidance. In this way, the 1926 appearance of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" works to show that 1 cannot step into the same river twice. History must menstruation on.

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There are several stories nigh travel here that I have attempted to tell — about Hughes's actual trip from Cleveland to United mexican states; about the paths that rivers cut into the mural and the histories they tell; almost this poem's trip from i form of print to some other. In each ane, space and time do something unexpected, and the story doesn't end where we retrieve it is going to end. When we call back Hughes is heading southward, he is actually heading west. A racist begetter waits to greet the beau who will become the greatest poet of the Harlem Renaissance. The rivers empty in places we don't expect. A poem lands twice upon a quickly changing readership. In the same way that there is no coherent narrative from slavery to liberty, Hughes'due south ain journeying, and the journey that his poem takes, cannot be easily mapped or known. Each journeying requires us to look harder, to investigate its details, to get off the railroad train and look effectually ourselves earlier we get dorsum on.

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Alexandra Socarides is the co-editor ofThe Poetry of Charles Brockden Brown, which will be published by Bucknell University Press in 2015.

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Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-poems-we-think-we-know-the-negro-speaks-of-rivers-by-langston-hughes/

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