“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was the first poem published in Langston Hughes’s long writing career. The poem first appeared in the magazine Crisis in June of 1921 and was subsequently published in Hughes’s first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues, in 1926. Written when he was only 19, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” treats themes Hughes explored all his life: the experiences of African Americans in history and black identity and pride. Hughes claimed that 90 percent of his work attempted “to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America.” Through images of rivers, African civilizations, and an “I” who speaks for the race, Hughes argues for the depth, wisdom, and endurance of the African soul. The form of the poem reinforces these themes. Using a collective, mythic “I,” long lines, and repeated phrases, Hughes invokes the poetry of Walt Whitman, another bard who “sang” America. Onwuchekwa Jemie notes in his book Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry, however, that unlike Whitman, Hughes “celebrates not the America that is but the America that is to come.”

Author Biography

Hughes was born in in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, to James Nathaniel and Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, who separated shortly after their son’s birth. Hughes’ mother had attended college, while his father, who wanted to become a lawyer, took correspondence courses in law. Denied a chance to take the Oklahoma bar exam, Hughes’ father went first to Missouri and then, still unable to become a lawyer, left his wife and son to move first to Cuba and then to Mexico. In Mexico, he became a wealthy landowner and lawyer. Because of financial difficulties, Hughes’ mother moved frequently in search of steady work, often leaving him with her parents. His grandmother Mary Leary Langston was the first black woman to attend Oberlin College. She inspired the boy to read books and value an education. When his grandmother died in 1910, Hughes lived with family friends and various relatives in Kansas. In 1915 he joined his mother and new stepfather in Lincoln, Illinois, where he attended grammar school. The following year, the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio. There he attended Central High School, excelling in both academics and sports. Hughes also wrote poetry and short fiction for the Belfry Owl, the high school literary magazine, and edited the school yearbook. In 1920 Hughes left to visit his father in Mexico, staying in that country for a year. Returning home in 1921, he attended Columbia University for a year before dropping out. For a time he worked as a cabin boy on a merchant ship, visited Africa, and wrote poems for a number of American magazines. In 1923 and 1924 Hughes lived in Paris. He returned to the United States in 1925 and resettled with his mother and half-brother in Washington, D.C. He continued writing poetry while working menial jobs. In May and August of 1925 Hughes’s verse earned him literary prizes from both Opportunity and Crisis magazines. In December Hughes, then a busboy at a Washington, D.C., hotel, attracted the attention of poet Vachel Lindsay by placing three of his poems on Lindsay’s dinner table. Later that evening Lindsay read Hughes’s poems to an audience and announced his discovery of a “Negro busboy poet.” The next day reporters and photographers eagerly greeted Hughes at work to hear more of his compositions. He published his first collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, in 1926. Around this time Hughes became active in the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of creativity among a group of African American artists and writers. Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and other writers founded Fire!, a literary journal devoted to African American culture. The venture was unsuccessful, however, and ironically a fire eventually destroyed the editorial offices. In 1932 Hughes traveled with other black writers to the Soviet Union on an ill-fated film project.

His infatuation with Soviet Communism and Joseph Stalin led Hughes to write on politics throughout the 1930s. He also became involved in drama, founding several theaters. In 1938 he founded the Suitcase Theater in Harlem, in 1939 the Negro Art Theater in Los Angeles, and in 1941 the Skyloft Players in Chicago. In 1943 Hughes received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Lincoln University, and in 1946 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He continued to write poetry throughout the rest of his life, and by the 1960s he was known as the “Dean of Negro Writers.” Hughes died in New York on May 22, 1967.

Poem Text

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 rivers.
  
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to    5
       sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids
       above it.

Media Adaptations

Langston Hughes: Poet, a 1994 release by Schlessinger Video Productions, blends biographical information with a discussion of Hughes’ art.
“The Negro Sings of Rivers” is one of several poems included on Langston Hughes: The Poet in Our Hearts, a 1995 video from Chip Taylor Communications.
The 1992 Waterbearer video, A Meditation on Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, dramatizes Hughes’ role in the Harlem of the 1930s.
Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper includes photographs, readings, criticism and biographical information about Hughes, a 1988 release by Intellimation.
The Harper Collins 1992 audiocassette, Langston Hughes Reads, includes “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe
       Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and
       I’ve seen its muddy bosom turnall golden in
       the sunset.          
  
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
  
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.           10

Poem Summary

Lines 1–4

Speaking for the African race (“negro” was the preferred term in 1921), the “I” of this poem links people of African descent to an ancient, natural, life-giving force: rivers. By asserting that he has “known rivers ancient as the world,” the speaker asserts that he, and people of African descent, have an understanding of elemental forces in nature that precede civilization. The repetition of “rivers” and “human” lends these lines a wise, resonant tone, like that found in Biblical passages. In the first two lines, the speaker refers to rivers as a natural force outside himself. Line 3 likens the human body to earth by comparing rivers to “human blood in human veins.” Line 4 personalizes that comparison as the speaker compares the depth of his soul to the depth of rivers. In the space of four lines the speaker moves from historically and symbolically associating himself and his people with rivers to metaphorically imagining rivers as part of his blood and soul. Rather than one human relationship to rivers emerging as true or primary, each of these associations intertwine.

Lines 5–7

Line 5 lets the reader know that the “I” is no mortal human speaker, but the mythic, timeless voice of a race. To have “bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young,” in prehistory, the speaker must be millions of years old. In lines 5 through 7, the speaker establishes the race’s ties to great, culturally rich civilizations along famous rivers in the Middle East and Africa. The Euphrates River was the cradle of ancient Babylonia. It flows from Turkey through Syria and modern Iraq. The Congo originates in central Africa and flows into the Atlantic. The Nile, which runs from Lake Victoria in Uganda in Africa through Egypt to the Mediterranean, was the site of ancient Egyptian civilization. The speaker’s actions show that he reveres the river and depends on it for multiple purposes. He bathes in the water, builds his hut next to it, listens to its music as he falls asleep, and is consoled or inspired by the river when, as a slave in Egypt, he builds the great pyramids.

These actions reinforce the notion (from lines 1-3) that peoples of African descent have ancient spiritual and physical ties to nature. When Hughes wrote this poem in 1921, ideas and images of primitive, tribal cultures were very chic in American art and literature. After Hughes visited Africa in 1923, he no longer viewed Africa as a mythic, exotic land where black identity was rooted, but instead as a land ravaged by Western imperialism, a symbol of lost roots. In his later writing, Hughes steered away from images of African primitivism, for he saw such depictions of African and African-American culture as impeding rather than advancing the cause of racial equality.

Lines 8–10

Here Hughes draws an analogy between the ancient rivers alongside which Africans founded civilizations, and the Mississippi, the river on which several American cities were built, including St. Louis (Hughes’s birthplace) and New Orleans. Onwuchekwa Jemie, writing in Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry, notes that “the magical transformation of the Mississippi from mud to gold by the sun’s radiance is mirrored in the transformation of slaves into free men by Lincoln’s Proclamation.” In The Life of Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad views this transformation as “the angle of a poet’s vision, which turns mud into gold.” The sun’s transformation of muddy water to gold provides an image of change. The change may represent the improved status of African Americans after the Civil War, hope for future changes, or the power of the poet to transform reality through imaginative language. Line 8 personifies the river by giving it the human capacity to sing. The river’s singing invokes both the slave spirituals and songs of celebration after the slaves were freed. Line 9 also personifies the river by endowing it with a “muddy bosom.” The Mississippi river is known for its muddiness. The term “bosom” is associated with women and so connotes fertility and nurturing. Through this personification, Hughes associates the ceaselessness of the mighty river with the eternal, life-affirming endurance of Africans and African Americans.

Lines 11–13

The poem closes with the phrases that opened it. The speaker’s language completes a cycle that mirrors the river’s eternal cycling of waters around the earth and the African race’s continuing role in human history. By enacting the circling of time and rivers, the speaker again associates himself with those elemental forces. The phrase “dusky rivers” refers literally to rivers that appear brown due to mud and cloudy skies. Figuratively, the phrase again likens rivers to peoples of African descent, whose skin is often called “dusky” or dark. The final line reaffirms the speaker’s sense of racial pride, of continuity with ancient, advanced civilizations, and of connection to life-giving, enduring forces in nature.

Themes

Heritage

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes’ first published poem, introduces a theme which would recur in several other works throughout his career. Many critics have classified this group as the “heritage” poems. Amazingly, although it was composed very quickly when he was only seventeen, it is both polished and powerful. In fact, in Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry, Onwuchekwa Jemie labels it the most profound of this group.

The poem utilizes four of the world’s largest and most historically prominent rivers as a metaphor to present a view, almost a timeline in miniature, of the African-American experience throughout history. The opening lines of the poem introduce the ancient and powerful cultural history of Africa and West Asia, with the mention of the Euphrates and the dawn of time. Next the Congo, mother to Central Africa, lulls the speaker, to sleep. The world’s longest river, the powerful and complex Nile with its great pyramids, follows. Last, the poem moves to more recent times, with the introduction of the Mississippi. Even though the Mississippi and Congo both hold bitter connotations of the slave trade, each of the four has contributed to the depth of the speaker’s soul. The poem stresses triumph over adversity as the “muddy bosom” of the Mississippi turns golden.

The speaker clearly represents more than Langston Hughes, the individual. In fact, the “I” of the poem becomes even more than the embodiment of a racial identity. The poem describes, underlying that identity, an eternal spirit, existing before the dawn of time and present still in the twentieth century. The different sections of the poem emphasize this: the speaker actually functions on two levels. One is the human level. The first words of lines five through eight create a picture of the speaker’s ancestors: bathing, building, looking, hearing. However, the poem also discusses a spiritual level where the soul of the speaker has been and continues to be enriched by the spirit of the river, even before the creation of humanity. Thus, the second and third lines of the poem develop an eternal, or cosmic, dimension in the poem.

Wisdom and Strength

The poem’s cosmic dimension adds an additional theme making the poem more than a tribute to the heritage of the past. It honors the wisdom and strength which allowed African-Americans to survive and flourish in the face of all adversity, most particularly the last few centuries of slavery. Hughes associates this strength with the spirit of these rivers which Jemie describes in Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry as “transcendent essences

Topics for Further Study

Rivers were vital to early civilizations, yet today many suffer from a variety of types of pollution. Choose one of the rivers mentioned in the poem and report on its current condition.
Research the importance of the Harlem Renaissance in giving voice to the soul of the African-American community.
Investigate Abraham Lincoln’s role in abolishing slavery.
Hughes connects the African-American soul with rivers. Write an extended metaphor connecting your spirit to some aspect of nature.

so ancient as to appear timeless, predating human existence, longer than human memory.” Jemie continues by noting that as the black man drank of these essences, he became endowed with the strength, the power and the wisdom of the river spirit. Thus Hughes stresses the ancient cultural heritage of the African-American, the soul which existed even before the “dawns were young.” The poem then makes clear that through all of the centuries, the speaker— or in other words, the collective soul—has survived indomitable, like the rivers. The poem exalts the force of character, the wisdom and strength, which created this survival.

This tribute developed out of Hughes’ personal life. He describes the inspiration for the poem in his autobiography, The Big Sea. While he was crossing the Mississippi on a visit to his father, a man who baffled and frustrated Hughes because of his prejudice, he began “thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people.” Hughes contrasts this attitude with his own admiration for the “bravest people possible—the Negroes from the Southern ghettoes—facing tremendous odds.” The Mississippi suddenly seemed to be a graphic symbol of that bravery. He notes that being sold down the river literally meant being torn violently from one’s own family. Yet even after centuries of brutal inhumanity in bondage, the African-American spirit has emerged triumphant. This poem became Hughes’ tribute to the strength and the wisdom of his people.

Rivers

Rivers have been a powerful force throughout human history. Many early mythologies made the river—or the river god—a symbol of both life and death. It is easy to understand the reason for this since most of the great early civilizations grew up in river valleys. The Euphrates, which is the first of the rivers mentioned in the poem, helps to form Mesopotamia. Even today, world history textbooks refer to the area using the symbolic phrase, the cradle of civilization, because of the number of ancient kingdoms which flourished there: Ur, Sumer, Babylon. The Nile, too, played a central role in early civilization. It ensured Egyptian prosperity. Thus the river was worshipped as the god, Khnum, who made the earth fruitful. Central African tribes also believed in the powerful river spirits who were sources of life, wisdom, and purification. Even, today, Christian baptism, which originated when John the Baptist anointed Jesus Christ in the River Jordan, represents both a symbol of purification and the entrance to new life.

S. Okechukwu Mezu discusses the importance of rivers in both mythology and poetry in his study The Poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor: “The river in most societies is considered a source of life, of new life in particular: a source of ablution and purification.” He then mentions several poets who absorb this view into their work, such as Hughes and Whitman, whose “personification of the river … is not far removed from the anthropomorphism and pantheism that characterize certain elements in African traditional religion.”

Style

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is spoken in first person point of view. However, the “I” represents neither a persona nor the author. Rather, the “I” speaks as and for people of African descent. “The Negro” of the title represents an archetype rather than an actual individual. There is a precedent for this collective “I” in the poetry of Walt Whitman, who spoke as and for America in his poem, “Song of Myself.” Hughes adopts two other elements in this poem that show the influence of Whitman: long lines and repetition of phrases. The long, free verse lines of this poem signal the speaker’s attempt to encompass the world with his words. Hughes repeats several phrases (“I’ve known rivers,” “my soul has grown deep like rivers”), to make the poem sound like an incantation, or magical spell. Some critics remark that these repetitions echo the tone and rhythm of black spirituals. Hughes became famous for his use of other African American musical forms in his poetry, particularly jazz and blues.

In addition to repeating phrases, Hughes repeats syntactic units in a catalog or list: “I’ve known,” “I bathed,” “I built,” “I looked,” etc. The Bible catalogs who begot whom, and who boarded the ark; the poet Virgil cataloged all the ships and heroes going into the Trojan War. Catalogs, like the technique of long lines, represent vast numbers and magnitude. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the catalog of the speaker’s actions testifies to his (and the race’s) vast worldly experience and importance in human history.

Historical Context

During the period of Reconstruction which followed the American Civil War, Northern troops remained in the South in order to help eradicate the lingering effects of slavery. In spite of much opposition, the Freedman’s Bureau was established; its purpose was, in large part, to protect the rights of the black population. In addition, branches of a political organization, known alternately as the Union or Loyalty League, were established to ensure voting rights for former slaves. As a result of this, many African Americans held political office at the local, state, and federal level; two black senators and several congressmen were elected from the South during those years. In fact, one of the senators, Hiram R. Revels, was elected to complete the term of Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy.

However, when the Northern troops left the region in 1877, state and local governments quickly returned to white domination. Local authorities began to set up a series of statutes aimed at disenfranchising black citizens. Poll taxes and literacy tests were mandated; laws requiring segregation were passed. The federal government in Washington looked the other way, ignoring the problem. Thus by the beginning of the twentieth century, the South was once again firmly under white control. Blacks were summarily denied rights they had previously held. In Alabama, for example, the number of blacks on the voting rolls went from 181,470 in 1900 to 3000 in 1901.

The denial of political and civil rights was, however, only a part of the problem which blacks faced in the United States. Once the Reconstruction era ended, blacks had little protection against a rising wave of violence directed against them. Lynching became part of the southern way of life. In “Blood at the Root,” an article on lynching in Time magazine, Richard Lacayo noted that “lynching evolved into a semiofficial institution of racial terror against blacks. All across the former Confederacy, blacks who were suspected of crimes against whites—or even ‘offenses’ no greater than failing to step aside for a white man’s car or protesting a lynching—were tortured, hanged and burned to death by the thousands.” The NAACP collected statistics which indicated that during the years between 1889 and 1918 over 2572 blacks were lynching victims.

Several prominent African-American leaders attempted to address these issues. One was Booker T. Washington, perhaps the most dominant figure in African-American political and social thought at the time and the founder of the Tuskeegee Institute in Alabama. He did not believe in directly challenging the unjust southern system. Instead, he felt that vocational and technical training, which would improve the economic status of blacks, would encourage a gradual change. The primary educational goal of his Tuskeegee Institute, therefore, was industrial education, the preparation for jobs. While academic subjects were not ignored, they also were not emphasized.

Several other noted black figures of the time, however, rejected Washington’s non-aggressive policy, calling his views accomodationist. One prominent critic was W.E.B. DuBois, a teacher and intellectual who had received a doctoral degree from Harvard. DuBois was joined by William Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian, a newspaper which regularly attacked Washington’s views. Both of these men felt that Washington’s approach, which was very popular with white politicians, was actually harmful to blacks. In 1905, the two organized a meeting at Niagara Falls to protest discrimination. The “Niagara Movement” called for active protest against injustice. This eventually led to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

Cedric Robinson in Black Movements in America describes the weaknesses, problems, and victories of the NAACP during its early years: “Despite its contradictions, its frequent political timidity, and the active hostility of presidents, congresses, and

Compare & Contrast

1921: Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of murder and sentenced to be executed; several observers felt the men were judged because of their anarchist politics rather than because they were truly guilty.

1997: Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, a liberal Democrat, posthumously pardoned Sacco and Vanzetti.

2000: Governor Dan Ryan of Illinois, imposed a moratorium on executions in the state since it was proved that since 1977 thirteen people who were sentenced to death were later declared innocent.
1921: Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along was produced on Broadway, one of the first black musicals to receive widespread public acclaim.

1948: Harry Truman uses one of the songs from Shuffle Along, “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” as his theme song in the Presidential campaign.

1999: The NAACP mounted protests against the television and movie industries for not employing enough black personnel, both on and off the screen.

government agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the NAACP managed from it earliest years to mount powerful propaganda and legal challenges to lynching; racist courts and juries; the exclusion of Blacks from the armed services; apartheid in public transportation, education, and housing.”

In spite of these successes of the NAACP, the black population in the United States was increasingly under attack. Woodrow Wilson, who was born in the South, proved hostile to black requests for equality, and soon segregation became official government policy in offices in Washington, D. C. When Monroe Trotter led a protest group to meet with Wilson, the two men became involved in an exceedingly angry confrontation. Mob violence was also on the increase. During the years from 1906 to 1920, race riots occurred in cities throughout the United States. In fact, the summer of 1919 was labeled the “Red Summer” by the poet, James Weldon Johnson, since riots took place in 25 different cities, leaving over 100 dead and many more injured. The NAACP organized marches to protest the violence.

This became another important part of the NAACP’s role: to publicize the issues facing blacks. In order to accomplish this, DuBois founded Crisis magazine, which also provided a forum for the artistic expression of black writers. For several decades, it provided a voice of protest, celebration, and opportunity. Crisis magazine first published Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in 1921.

Critical Overview

As Hughes’s first published poem, critics view “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” as the first indication of the poet’s lifelong themes and concerns. Although most critics now praise his ongoing dedication to racial struggle, when The Weary Blues, was published in 1926, critical reactions were mixed. A number of reviewers, including black intellectuals, questioned whether Hughes’s colloquial language and racial themes constituted propaganda or “real art,” oversimplification or clear vision. Critics do not claim that “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is particularly propagandistic, though it heralds a moralizing tendency in Hughes’s poetry. This poem, moreover, is sometimes considered one of his lyrics, and lyrics are often considered non-political.

Critics regard this poem as a lyric because it has a first person speaker who expresses a strongly felt emotion and appears to exist outside of time. These critics note, however, that the “I” in the poem represents less an individual persona or Hughes himself than a mythic, collective persona. Several critics suggest that the lyric speaker of this poem begins with personal memory but moves steadily toward collective memory. Raymond Smith, in his essay, “Hughes: Evolution of the Poetic Persona,” argues that in both early and later poems, Hughes “transforms personal experience and observations into distillations of the Black American condition.” In his essay, “The Origins of Poetry in Langston Hughes,” Arnold Rampersad similarly argues that “personal anguish has been alchemized by the poet into a gracious meditation on his race, whose despised (“muddy”) culture and history … changes within the poem from mud into gold.” Rampersad also finds in the poem a traditional lyric concern with time and death. In The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I, Rampersad writes, “With its allusions to deep dusky rivers, the setting sun, sleep and the soul, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is suffused with the image of death and, simultaneously, the idea of deathlessness.”

Critics often attribute the personal anguish Rampersad mentions to Hughes’s anxieties about his father. Hughes wrote the poem on a train he took to visit his estranged father in Mexico. Crossing the Mississippi outside St. Louis, Missouri, his birthplace, Hughes recalled, “I looked out the window … [and] began to think what that [muddy] river, the old Mississippi, had meant to Negroes in the past—how to be sold down the river was the worst fate that could overtake a slave … Then I remembered reading how Abraham Lincoln had made a trip down the Mississippi on a raft, … seen slavery at its worst, and had decided within himself that it should be removed from American life. Then I began to think of other rivers in our past …” In this record of the poem’s composition, Hughes reveals how a personal meditation was transformed through his associations into a meditation on collective racial identity and history, and how a lyric became an ars poetica, or artistic statement, for his career.

Criticism

Chloe Bolan

Chloe Bolan teaches English as an adjunct at Columbia College of Missouri extensions in Lake County and Crystal Lake, IL. She writes plays, short stories, poems and essays and is currently working on a novel. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes, she interprets the poem as not only a black history lesson, but as a deeply felt and dignified tribute to those of African heritage.

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is probably the most anthologized of Langston Hughes’ poems. Although Hughes brought rhythmic innovations from jazz and the blues to his future poetry, this classic poem, written when he was only 18 years old, stands at the gateway of his entire body of work. In it is the beginning of his “affirmation of blackness,” as critic Raymond Smith states in “Hughes: Evolution of the Poetic Persona” from Modern Critical Views: Langston Hughes.

The black man had been brought to American shores as a slave and his presence preceded the birth of the United States, but in those years of forced illiteracy when a slave was forbidden to read and write, no work of note dealt with his history. After being freed by Abraham Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, his rights were squashed in the South under the Jim Crow laws. These blatant injustices dealt with separate but unequal drinking fountains, blacks sitting at the back of the bus, not being allowed into hotels except through the back door as employees, and innumerable other humiliations. In particular, the act of voting was made into such an obstacle course for black voters, most were discouraged from the ordeal. Those that weren’t found themselves physically threatened. The liberal North harbored less but subtler prejudices that stifled black initiative. When Langston Hughes began writing, he devised his own emancipation proclamation, quoted in “The Black Aesthetic in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties” by Dudley Randall in Modern Black Poets:

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to
express our individual dark-skinned selves without
fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are
glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we
are beautiful. And ugly too. If colored people are
pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure
doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow,
strong as we know how, and we stand on
top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

Despite this thrust toward individual black pride, pride of black heritage was a necessary element to “stand on top of the mountain.” Hughes knew this on a personal level, since his father, of mixed race but always identified as black, despised the Negro and left the United States to become highly successful in Mexico. In fact, Hughes was

“In the end, after a life of cruel hardship, the heavenly rewards come at death, at sunset. The black mother and her progeny, who never abandoned their spirituality but refined it into music, poetry, and dance, are now seen for their true value, revealed in the light as golden.”

on his way there to ask his father for college tuition when he wrote this poem. Although Hughes would soon hate his father for his views, when he wrote this, his hatred had not surfaced yet. This poem was most likely an anticipated reply to his father’s criticism. In that case, out of anxiety and suppressed anger, a positive and stately poem emerged.

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” begins with the speaker’s claim: “I’ve known rivers.” Rivers suggest to us places of travel, exploration, discovery, and even settling down beside one. Then he expands the idea: he has “known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human / blood in human veins.” Now we are being transported back in time, not to man’s ancient history, but to a time before man even existed, when the rivers alone existed. Yet these rivers mirror man because the water that flows in their channels is similar to the blood that flows in man’s veins. Also, our speaker is giving us a sweeping overview, suggesting possibly the beginnings of life by presenting a picture of water, one of the essentials for life. At this point, also, we understand the speaker is not only speaking for himself, but for all Negroes.

In the second stanza, which is only a line, Hughes compares his soul to the rivers, saying it has the depth of a river. Decades after this poem was published, during the 1960s, “soul” became a term used to describe black music and black food. The implications were that this music and food came from the deprivations the black man had to endure in an oppressive white society and, therefore, came from the soul.

In the third stanza, the speaker traces Negro history through rivers intimately connected with the evolution of those with African roots. He tells us he “bathed in the Euphrates River when dawns were young.” The Euphrates and the Tigris in present day Iraq comprise a two-river system that creates what is known as the fertile crescent, land between these rivers that benefits from the waters overflowing their banks. Millennia ago, “when dawns were young,” and the country was called Mesopotamia, this fertile soil allowed its people not merely to survive, but to flourish, and western civilization began here along with western writing. Also, according to Muslims, Jews, and Christians, the Garden of Eden existed nearby, a beautiful spot believed to be the Al-Qurah of today. Although the Negro race did not begin in the Middle East, due to Africa’s proximity, an African could have bathed in the Euphrates in ancient times. Besides, African slaves were sold to countries in the Americas populated by Judeo-Christian Europeans, products of this Mesopotamian-born, Western civilization. So, by force, this background became the Negroes’ background.

The next river mentioned is the Congo, the second longest river in Africa, which runs through the center of the continent. Hughes states in A Pictorial History of Black Americans, “that Africa not only gave the world its earliest civilizations, it gave the world man.” Africa has long been considered the birthplace of man, since the human bones excavated there are the oldest found. Here the speaker “built [his] hut” and was “lulled … to sleep,” suggesting the idealized beauty and peace the Negro enjoyed in this earliest of Edens. Here, too, rich civilizations rose up in a world where man lived beside the lion and the elephant. Ironically, though, in the more recent past, tribes living along the Congo, and the Kongo tribe in particular, helped feed the slave trade. This kind of betrayal can only happen to those who are “lulled … to sleep” and unable to take action. The second interpretation does not contradict the first, but puts events into sequence and deepens the poetry.

The third river is the Nile, the longest river in Africa and one that flows through many African nations. But the speaker is referring to those places along the river where he “raised the pyramids above it.” Those Africans who helped build the pyramids were the Nubians who had a respected role in Egyptian society as soldiers and traders. More importantly, Hughes states in A Pictorial History of Black Americans, that “[b]lack Pharaohs ruled Egypt for centuries and black Queen Nefertete [was] one of the most beautiful women of all time.” Although Hughes might have wished to emphasize the Nile’s glamour, the fact is, the whole of ancient Egyptian religion lauded death over life and focused on the pharaohs and their comfortable survival in the next world. Because of the pyramids, the Egyptians needed as much manpower as possible and enslaved those they captured to build their gigantic tombs. Still, this knowledge does little to detract from the glamour and, if anything, balances it with reality.

The last river mentioned is the Mississippi, the longest river in the United States, and one intimately connected to slavery. A slave sold down the river in Mark Twain’s Missouri was doomed to an even worse fate than he was already living: Slavery was more entrenched in the deep South, escape to the free states was even farther away, and any slave sent down the river was not only leaving a familiar place, but family as well. However, the speaker “heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New /Orleans”; the river was “singing” because, according to legend, when the future president saw the horrors of slavery, he vowed to eliminate that institution from the country.

In the last half of that line, the speaker has seen the Mississippi’s “muddy bosom turn golden in the sunset.” On a physical level, the speaker as Hughes most likely saw that phenomena as he wrote the poem on a train crossing the river from Illinois to St. Louis, Missouri. Its muddy bosom connects it to the Negro mother who nurtured her babies despite the fact that they could be taken away from her at any time and despite the fact that some of their fathers were the white masters. In the end, after a life of cruel hardship, the heavenly rewards come at death, at sunset. The black mother and her progeny, who never abandoned their spirituality but refined it into music, poetry and dance, are now seen for their true value, revealed in the light as golden.

In the fourth stanza the speaker repeats the phrase that he has “known rivers,” but now he broadens the image to include “[a]ncient, dusky rivers.” This concludes our history tour and ties these rivers to the color of dusk, the magical color of twilight, and the color of the Negro. The Negro encompasses the African in Africa or on any other continent, and especially the African-American, Hughes’ first audience.

What Do I Read Next?

The Crisis Reader: Stories, Poetry and Essays from the NAACP’s Crisis Magazine not only includes some of Hughes’ work but also provides insights into the political, cultural, social thought of Black America in the first part of this century.
This 1999 release of W. E. B. DuBois’The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., provides an informative perspective for viewing DuBois’ classic work.
The 1958 Brazilier collection, the Langston Hughes Reader, includes some of Hughes’ best work in all genres.
Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform and Renewal, An African American Anthology contains Hughes’ “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” as well as works by W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, and several writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
Hughes admired Carl Sandburg’s poetry for its populist stance; Sandburg’s Complete Poems are available in a Harcourt Brace edition.
The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader collects essays, memoirs, poetry, and fiction of the period, along with a brief but informative history.

The last stanza repeats the second stanza: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” Now we understand more profoundly what the speaker means, for each of these rivers has nurtured the Negro and some have transported him as a slave. The final repetitions also add a rhythm to the poem, as if, after the flow of the first and third stanzas, like the river, this poem has arrived at its mouth, its place of proclamation to the world. These people, these Negroes, have come out of Africa, and later out of slavery, and they have flourished in the fertile crescent of their spirituality and contributed much to

“Like Whitman in “Song of Myself,” Hughes constructs a poem that not only connects the individual to the land, to particular geographical places but also to history and to a distinctive culture, making the poem, like the river itself, a vehicle by which one flows through one space into another.”

world civilization. Let them look back on a golden heritage, Hughes seems to say; let them speak of these rivers that are so much a part of that heritage.

Source: Chloe Bolan, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.

Dean Rader

Dean Rader has published widely in the field of twentieth-century poetry. In his essay he explores the connections between Hughes and Walt Whitman.

In his poem, “I, Too,” Hughes both implicitly and explicitly responds to the great poet of freedom and democracy, Walt Whitman. Hughes’ opening lines recalls Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,” “Still Though the One I Sing” and even Song of Myself. Hughes’ poem suggests that he, the Negro, the “Other,” can also sing of and for America. A similar notion is at work in Hughes’ famous poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In this poem, Hughes invokes the technique and spirit of Whitman yet again in an attempt to write a lyric that carries both public and private significance. Like Whitman in “Song of Myself,” Hughes constructs a poem that not only connects the individual to the land, to particular geographical places but also to history and to a distinctive culture, making the poem, like the river itself, a vehicle by which one flows through one space into another.

Perhaps the first formal signpost to Whitman is Hughes’ use of the first person singular. Of course, poets have been using the first person for centuries, but Whitman and Hughes both use the lyric “I” in ways unlike other poets. For one thing, the “I” in the poems does not really stand for the literal, biographical human beings Walt Whitman and Hughes. In Song of Myself, for instance, Whitman writes early on that he is in “perfect health,” but we know now that he was not always in particularly good health. In fact, he was often in poor health. And, it is unlikely that he literally sent his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world, though he might have done a good deal of yelling. Similarly, the biographical figure, Hughes, did not build his hut near the Congo, as he says in the poem, nor did he participate in the construction of the pyramids in Egypt. In both poems, the poets use the lyric persona to let the individual stand for many, or, to be more precise, to stand for everyone. In line two of Song of Myself, Whitman writes, “And what I assume you shall assume / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” In this poem, Whitman lays the groundwork for Hughes; he establishes the ability for the lyric “I” to stand for both the individual and society. So, in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” when Hughes writes, “I bathed in the Euphrates,” or “I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans,” he is not speaking autobiographically, he is speaking metaphorically. He has not done these things himself; he has done them through others. Through a poetic and cultural connection to these places and to history, he has participated in important events for African and African-American citizens.

This African and African-American thematic in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” distinguishes Hughes’ poem from Whitman’s water poems and, for that matter, Song of Myself. Where Whitman’s texts aggressively attempt to subsume all readers and certainly all Americans, Hughes’ trajectory is more narrow. His poem rises out of a decidedly African-American concern. At no point in the poem does he mention Boston or England or Plymouth Rock. Instead, he positions the poem amidst an overtly African and African-American landscape, in particular, the rivers of Africa and the deep South. Hughes uses the metaphor of the river, of a river’s origin, to comment on his own origin and the origin of black experiences across the globe. It is possible that Hughes is suggesting a kind of shared cultural memory—N. Scott Momaday, the great American-Indian writer, claims he has a memory of crossing the Bering Strait centuries ago—but more likely, he posits that he is part and parcel of every man from the Congo or every woman from Mississippi who has come before him. In other words, all past African and Africa American history has flowed and emptied into him, just as a river empties into the sea. He is the repository of their hopes, their dreams, their struggles, their pride, and their cultural heritage. Just because these individuals or even these societies no longer exist, does not mean that they are dead. They live on through the poet, through his voice and through his poetry. Additionally, the poem stands as a provocative testament to African-American culture-like the Mississippi, it will continue moving, progressing, growing.

This notion of growing, of thriving is important for Hughes, because he wants his poem to carry the same invigorating power as rivers themselves. In his important book Structuralist Poetics, Jonathan Culler discusses the importance of performative language on ancient and contemporary cultures. According to Culler, performative language is expression that makes things happen, that is performance itself. A great deal of early Native American poetry is an excellent example of performative language. For Native Americans, there was no distinction between poetry, spells, rituals and songs. All were one singular expression that animated the world and the gods. Many scholars have commented on how Whitman’s long lists, his catalogs, resemble a chant or an incantation, emblematic of many Native-American songs. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes enacts a similar mode of communication. The repetition of “I’ve known rivers” gives the poem an otherworldly feel, as though it were a sacred text, perhaps biblical. Indeed, the “I’ve known rivers” refrain, and the chant-like list in the third stanza recall a psalm or a Christian litany or a gospel song. In his book The Weary Blues, the collection in which “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” appears, Hughes includes a section of poems called “The Feet of Jesus,” which imitate gospel songs and Sunday morning preaching. Thus, his poem not only echoes the incanta-tory orality of pre-literate African cultures, but it also mirrors the incantatory orality of contemporary African American worship services, prayers, and songs. In both instances, and in the poem itself, the individual speaker participates in communal discourse, and mere language is transformed into something transcendent.

While Hughes’ poem works on a cultural or spiritual level, it also works on a political level, just as many of Whitman’s do. Also like Whitman, Hughes’ poems are deceptively complex. On the surface, they seem easily accessible, perhaps even simple. But, in almost every instance, the poems carry a subtext of anger or resistance or outrage, yet, Hughes is able to make his vision palatable to white audiences. In an early review of The Weary Blues, Alain Locke claims that in this collection, there is “a mystic identification with the race experience which is, I think, instinctively deeper and broader than any of the poets has yet achieved.” More than any other poem in the book, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” embodies Locke’s argument. In this poem, dedicated to the great African-American writer W. E. B. DuBois, Hughes grounds contemporary African-American culture in its regal culture of African history. Without question, whites and blacks are the target audience. He wants to remind both black and white readers of the rich and regal history of African Americans, and he wants to inform his black audience that his soul and their souls have been nourished by these experiences. That they, like each of the major rivers referred to in the poem will persist and endure, is one of Hughes’ main themes for the piece.

Through his poetry, particularly Song of Myself, Whitman turns America into a kind of myth. He says in his introduction to Song of Myself that America is itself the greatest poem. Similarly, Hughes elevates the experiences and history of African Americans to the level of myth. The speaker, a sort of bard-like figure, constructs a worldview that offers a spiritual, physical, historical, and personal narrative, a timeless reading of the union of past and present realities. Through this poem, Hughes suggests that African Americans are themselves a great poem, a masterful epic, more sweeping, more powerful than the mere two hundred years informing the poem that is America. Without question, Hughes links the scope of the epic with the steadiness and vitality of the river with African American experiences, suggesting, in the final analysis, that all are connected. Water flows through Africa, through America, and as Hughes suggests in the first stanza, water courses through these lands as blood through the veins, linking both physical and spiritual humanity. According to R. Baxter Miller, Hughes creates a kind of myth that speaks to the generative force of black persistence: “Whether north or south, east or west, the rivers signify in concentric half-circles the fertility as well as the dissemination of life.” Indeed, throughout the poem, through the anagogic river and metaphors of flowing and connection, Hughes reclaims America through its origins in Africa.

“Part of him denies the relevance of Africa at all. The central force of the question in his refrain is rhetorical—“one three centuries removed” from his original homeland, how can Africa mean anything to him? But within Cullen’s poem lies a different answer—for imaginings of Africa inhabit him, almost haunting him.”

Source: Dean Rader, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.

Sarah Madsen Hardy

Sarah Madsen Hardy has a doctorate in English literature and is a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, she compares Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” to “Heritage,” a poem by Hughes’ Harlem Renaissance contemporary Countee Cullen.

Poets often use their poems to speak to each other across centuries and continents—and sometimes, just across town. Hughes and Countee Cullen were part of the same literary generation. Born within a year of each other, both poets found their way to Harlem, which was, in the 1920s, beginning to rise to fame as the vital and fashionable center of African-American art and culture. Both men are remembered as representatives of one of the most important American literary and arts movements, the Harlem Renaissance, which reached its height in the 1930s. However, these two black poets had very different views of race and art. While both promoted racial equality and progress for blacks through their art, Cullen drew on the largely British tradition of his formal schooling when he wrote. Hughes was also well educated, but he drew inspiration for his poetry largely from folk forms, including, most notably, the African-American musical tradition of the blues. In this essay, I will compare two of their poems as part of a literary dialogue between the poets about the significance of Africa to African Americans—Hughes’ first publication, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and one of Cullen’s best known poems, “Heritage.” The poems take up a remarkably similar theme, but their interesting differences in form and philosophy highlight the complexity of the question both poets pose: in Cullen’s famous words, “What is Africa to me?”

In their poems, Hughes and Cullen take up the issue of the place of Africa in the mind and soul of the African-American poet. This was an important question during the Harlem Renaissance because, up until this point in American history, the only African Americans who were given any credit for serious artistic talent were those—like Phyllis Wheatley—who were adept at making use of white, European forms, despite their limited access and experiential connection to this tradition. The Harlem Renaissance actually began as an artistic movement of white artists who provocatively drew inspiration from supposedly primitive African and African-American art forms. Later in the movement, blacks began to claim these sources for their own artistic expression and use them toward more political ends. But in the early-and mid-1920s, when these poems were written, the status of black artists drawing on Africa for inspiration was still quite tentative. The poems present conflicting visions of Africa as a part of the African-American self and as a source of inspiration for the black poet.

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” uses the central metaphor of the river to speak of a black history that flows fluidly from Africa to America. The speaker does not reflect Hughes as an individual, but rather his connection to a mythic and collective black soul. What makes such a collectivity possible is the powerful force of shared history. “Heritage” also addresses the relationship between Africa and America within the African-American self, but Cullen’s vision is far less peaceful and continuous. He speaks individually and personally of a self divided, cut off from Africa by the forces of history. Part of him denies the relevance of Africa at all. The central force of the question in his refrain is rhetorical—“one three centuries removed” from his original homeland, how can Africa mean anything to him? But within Cullen’s poem lies a different answer—for imaginings of Africa inhabit him, almost haunting him. Africa exists as a chaotic, passionate shadow force within his “civilized” poet’s soul.

The idea of civilization is important to both Cullen and Hughes. In the Harlem Renaissance, whites celebrated the supposedly “primitive” (that is, natural, basic, and uncivilized) qualities of black culture because they were seen as rejuvenating a depleted, over-civilized Western culture. This put black artists in an awkward position, for they needed to prove themselves as artists capable of mastering the “sophisticated” European styles associated with civilization, but they at once wanted to draw on and bring value to their own cultural influences and traditions. Hughes’ poem claims civilization from its most ancient as the birthright of the African American. He claims for blacks a proud legacy that dwarfs any achievements of the United States’ one-hundred-fifty-year history, and even those of Europe. “I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. / I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. / I looked on the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.” In contrast, Cullen is torn by a familiar— and racist—dichotomy between (white/Western) civilization and (black/African) nature. There is a fascinating tension in his poem between its formal meter and rhyme scheme—which demonstrate the author’s “civilized” discipline and respect for European literary tradition—and the powerful imagery of an imaged Africa, which speaks to the “wildness” in his soul: “So I lie, who all day long / Want no sound except the song / Sung by wild barbaric birds / Goading massive jungle herds, / Juggernauts of flesh that pass / Trampling tall defiant grass / Where young forest lovers lie, / Plighting troth beneath the sky.” Hughes denies any such tension between civilization and nature. The river, a symbol of nature, has a dignity that makes small even the collective efforts of human civilization; it is “older than the flow of human blood in human veins.” But the river is at once part of human history and civilization, carrying the speaker from ancient times to a chapter in American history that was, at the time Hughes wrote, still within individual memory. His form reflects this confidence and harmony. The poem uses repetition of phrases and structures in a manner similar to a song. Rather than adapting a European style to his own devices as does Cullen, Hughes draws on an oral culture that is both ancient African and contemporary African American. In doing so, he redefines what it means to be civilized to include the cultural traditions of Africa.

Closely associated with the question of the African-American’s claim to civilization is the issue of the his relationship to a collective past. The relevance of history to African Americans was one of the issues debated among participants in the Harlem Renaissance. Some promoted the image of the New Negro, one that left behind the ignorance and humiliation of slavery and reinvented himself. The idea of a new man, one who leaves his history behind, is part of an American tradition dating from the Pilgrims and encompassing the many immigrant groups who came to the United States to start anew. In the case of African Americans, the history left behind is the ignoble past of slavery, wherein blacks were treated as animals in an ultimate stripping away of claims to civilization and selfhood. Cullen speaks from the position of the New Negro, asking, “What is last year’s snow to me? / Last year’s anything? The tree / Budding yearly must forget / How its past arose or set.” The irony of the title “Heritage” is that it debates whether heritage really exists for African Americans and questions the extent to which it is a source of power.

The image of the New Negro was at odds, however, with the re-valuation of indigenous African and African-American art forms that also characterized the Harlem Renaissance. Once whites took an interest in jazz and African sculpture, they earned new cache as Culture. Though Hughes, like Cullen, studied British poetry, its influence is little in evidence in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” or much of his other poetry. He both reclaims and redefines history for African Americans by turning away from European traditions and derogatory definitions of Africanness, instead valuing oral forms such as the blues. Admitting to none of the conflict over heritage that Cullen expresses, Hughes looks grandly upon a past that transcends the moment of slavery, referring to its horrors only as they came to an end, “when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans.”

Both poets use water imagery to express the African-American’s relationship to the past. Hughes speaks of rivers, and Cullen describes the primal beat of rain falling to evoke a primitive African self lurking within. Hughes’ river flows strongly forward, carrying hope for the future, “its muddy bosom turn[ing] all gold in the sunset,” but the sound of rain agitates Cullen, as it threatens to pull him backward into an obscure, imagined time before history: “From the unremittant beat / made by cruel padded feet / Walking through my body’s street./ Up and down they go, and back / Treading out a jungle track. // … In an old remembered way / Rain works on me night and day.” Hughes proudly claims Africans as a historical people—a radical assertion in light of the predominant view of them as primitive and “timeless” propagated by Europeans. Cullen, in contrast, shows how this racist view has divided his consciousness and hindered his ability to draw power from his heritage. For him, Africa is “a book one thumbs”—one written by Europeans. The African heritage that Cullen portrays so ambivalently in his poem is ahistorical, while Hughes argues forcefully for the African-American’s claim to a historical tradition—one that is not dependent on the Westernized mediation of book learning, but instead relies on a form of knowledge intrinsic to the black soul.

Though they address remarkably similar questions and concerns, the two poems can be understood as having different goals and, therefore, offering different visions. Hughes offers a representation of the black soul as strong and unified, despite the injuries done to it by the racism of the American context. Though his poem speaks of the past, Hughes’s vision is focused on the future, when the devastation of slavery can begin to seem small in relationship to a long and proud historical tradition. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” can be understood as a utopian vision, one that is located in an ideal and mythic “no place.” Cullen’s “Heritage,” in contrast, offers a vision of the human struggle of his present context. The African-American soul that he portrays is not ideal, but real. It is torn and pained by racism, though not destroyed by it. Cullen is bent on using his art to show the struggle, while Hughes creates a poem in which the struggle has been overcome.

Source: Sarah Madsen Hardy, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.

Sources

Baldwin, James, “Sermons and Blues,” in The New York Times Book Review, March 29, 1959, p. 6.

Hughes, Langston, The Big Sea, Knopf, 1940, reprinted Hill and Wang, 1993.

Hughes, Langston, Milton Meltzer, and C. Eric Lincoln, “First, We Were Africans,” in A Pictorial History of Black-americans, Crown Publishers, Inc., 1983, p. 7.

Jemie, Onwuchekwa, Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1976.

Lacayo, Richard, “Blood at the Root,” in Time, April 10, 2000, pp. 122-123.

Locke, Alain, review of The Weary Blues, 1927.

Mezu, S. Okechukwe, The Poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973.

Miller, R. Baxter, “Some Mark to Make”: The Lyrical Imagination of Langston Hughes, Critical Essays on Langston Hughes, edited by Edward J. Mullen, G. K. Hall &, Co., 1986, p. 160.

Rampersad, Arnold, The Life of Langston Hughes: I, Too, Sing America, Vol. I, 1902–1941, Oxford University Press, 1986, 468 p.

———,The Origins of Poetry in Langston Hughes,” in Langston Hughes, Edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1989, pp. 179-189.

Randall, Dudley, “The Black Aesthetic in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties,” in Modern Black Poets, edited by Donald B. Gibson, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973, p. 35.

Robinson, Cedric J, Black Movements in America, Rout-ledge, 1997.

Smith, Raymond, “Hughes: Evolution of the Poetic Persona,” in Langston Hughes, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1989, pp. 45-60.