The Negro Speaks Of Rivers Analysis

Langston Hughes poems “Harlem” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” are two poems that have a deeper meaning than a reader may notice. Hughes 's poem “Harlem” incorporates the use of similes to make a reader focus on the point Hughes is trying to make. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes shows how close he was to the rivers on a personal level. With those two main focuses highlighted throughout each poem, it creates an intriguing idea for a reader to comprehend. In these particular poems, Hughes’s use of an allusion, imagery, and symbolism in each poem paints a clear picture of what Hughes wants a reader to realize. Langston Hughes uses two allusions in his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” The first allusion comes from lines five and six.

In lines five through six of this poem, the speaker says, “I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.” These lines give the image of when the speaker lived by the main rivers in Africa. These rivers were the speaker’s favorite things about Africa. Based on the context, the image the speaker gives about the Euphrates is that it was a warm, calm, and safe source of water for the people of Africa to use. The Congo river was a river the speaker lived by while in Africa. The way the speaker talks about the Congo gives it the image of a bedtime remedy. Its waters flowing over rocks, waves crashing smoothly with each other, and short crescendoing waves washing up onto the beach soothe the speaker and lull him to sleep. The way Hughes uses imagery in these poems to describe his the surroundings enhances his literature to a whole new

The poem “Harlem” seems like a simple poem that talks about a dream that fades away. The poem is more symbolic than it seems though. The three sentences that have a huge impact on this poem’s symbolism are spread out through the poem. A reader needs to keep in mind that the speaker is talking about a dream in these sentences. “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” (CITE STORY). This sentence symbolizes a dream that has no hope of becoming true and eventually dries up. The sun represents the other duties that weigh in on a person’s dreams and causes the dream to eventually fade away. The line saying, “Or fester like a sore- and then run?,” is another line full of symbolism. A sore usually swells and festers into a bump. Once it has run its course, it opens up and oozes the infection out. The sore symbolizes the dream. The dream steadily grows and finally reaches its maximum capacity and once it does, it starts to fade away because it is inhibited from growing, which symbolizes the infection running out of the sore. The sore symbolizes how the dream was almost close to being realistic, but the infection running out of the sore symbolizes how the dream began to go away. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” symbolism is not evident as the symbolism presented in “Harlem”. The only source of symbolism in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” comes from the line saying, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers”(CITE STORY). This statement