Langston Hughes The Negro Speaks Of Rivers

The poem that garnered my interest is “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, authored by Langston Hughes. Hughes was one of the first black men to support himself through writing. The afore-mentioned is a huge deal, considering the timeframe Hughes was brought up in. Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1st, 1902, and died on May 22, 1967, in New York, New York. It was always an uphill battle for Hughes in the writing world, due to all of the slavery issues and racial rights involving African Americans in the United States. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, the narrator speaks of knowing all of the great rivers, ancient as the world is. The narrator glibly comments about how it is older than even humanity, hence older than the flow of blood in human veins. He/she goes on to speak of a soul as a tangible thing, which has grown deep like the afore mentioned rivers. The narrator then tells of how he/she bathed in the Euphrates back when the earth was young, how he/she
Hughes’ title of the poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, explains the whole poem in five words. Therefore, it is quite easy to understand that the poem is a history of Africa, and its people. Throughout the poem, rivers are directly tied into places in the world where the African people have flourished, be it by choice or through enslavement. In the end, all the places that the African people have been, for good or for ill, define them, as a whole. Slavery is tied into the African people’s tale near the end of the poem. According to Langston Hughes, “I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.” (“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”). Thus, I concluded that Hughes wanted to embody the whole of African people as the true narrator of his