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The Negro Speaks Of Rivers Analysis

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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. …show more content…

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 …show more content…

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

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Similarly, Hughes uses grotesque imagery to emphasize the decay of a forgotten idea. However, said forgotten idea can be interpreted as more than a concept when the time period is taken into account. Through analysis, it’s possible to construe Hughes’s dream as a person or society. In the line “Or fester like a sore-- And then run?” (Hughes 4), imagery is used to conjure the picture of a blister on human skin.

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The Harlem Renaissance was a “outpouring of writing, music, and social criticism” (Baker, 1987) aimed at destroying the ever-present racism of the 1920s. Langston Hughes, an artist of the Harlem Renaissance, was a big contributor to change, inspiring those of his own time and later on to stand up for African American rights. Penning the 1926 manifesto The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, Hughes encapsulated the thoughts of Harlem, and urged African Americans to be proud of their own culture, “without fear or shame” (Hughes in Bernard, 2011).

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Langston Hughes once said, “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly”. What Langston Hughes is trying to convey is that a person who does not dream freely will be as impaired as a bird who cannot fly. In other words, this person will never reach his dream, let alone get from point A to point B. In Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, she attempts to tell readers the story of an African American family who similarly are having troubles fulfilling their dreams. Throughout the course of the play Hansberry utilizes historical facts alongside with personal opinion to convey to her readers the argument that people can still dream and hope despite their struggles.

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The culture of most blacks was unwanted during this time. For this reason Hughes desired to make a change and illustrate such cultural identities in his poems. In doing this he caused a shift in ideas among all people. Although the change didn’t happen immediately it did eventually occur. With that said the African American people were given less of an opportunity at jobs, schooling, and most importantly culture.

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Langston Hughes emerged as a towering figure of the Harlem Renaissance, his evocative, jazz-inflected poetry giving a powerful voice to the African American experience. " Hughes purposefully mixed his own personal experiences into his work, setting him apart from other major Black poets of the era, and placing him at the forefront of the literary movement," the sources explain (Hughes 1). In seminal works like "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "I, Too," Hughes asserted the inherent dignity and beauty of the black community, rejecting the notion that African American culture was inferior or unworthy of artistic expression (Hughes 1). Beyond his poetic output, Hughes was also a tireless advocate for black artists, using his platform to champion the Harlem Renaissance and ensure its

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Those Winter Sundays" uses imagery to convey the themes of love and sacrifice that a father has for his children. In "Harlem" the author asks about the dreams that have been pushed aside. He asks "Does it dry up/ like a raisin in the sun?" (2-3). These lines use visual imagery to and cause the reader to imagine a grape drying up and turning into a raisin.

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An example of the author conveying the theme of community in this work is, “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.” This line from the poem shows how the figurative language describes the dark past of African American History and how people have been there to see its dark past and how it’s blossoming into a bright future. The Negro Speaks of Rivers is yet another one of the many works from the Harlem Renaissance that conveys the importance of working

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Being from Mississippi, Hughes would have been familiar with the Mississippi River and this may partly explain why more emphasis is placed on the details of this river than any of the others. The author’s description of the Mississippi River contains more words than any other line in the poem. The line reads “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” (7). This reference to President Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator, hints at the theme of African American freedom as another connection to Langston Hughes’ present day struggle with finding freedom as an artist in a society that confined the lives of African Americans. The importance of this

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Exploring African American culture and their unique heritage is another common theme of writers from the Harlem Renaissance era. In Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, Hughes focuses on the long history of African American race and its roots. Hughes writes, “I’ve known rivers as ancient as the world and older than the blood in human veins.” In the following stanza it says, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” These lines symbolizes African American culture’s rich, proud history filled with

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In Langston Hughes's time, America was in a tough spot with racial segregation and discrimination everywhere. Life for Black people was a constant battle against unfair treatment and being denied basic rights. The Jim Crow laws enforced this separation, making sure Black folks couldn't share public spaces, schools, or even homes with white people, keeping inequality alive and well. Despite all this, Hughes used his poetry to speak out against these injustices and show the struggles Black people faced. His words painted a vivid picture of what life was like for them, shining a light on the unfairness and hypocrisy of a society divided by race.

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Poems are tools used to demonstrate dissatisfaction. The play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry leads by foreshadowing its theme of crushed dreams by starting with the poem A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes. The play follows an African-American family in 1950s Chicago, consisting of protagonist Walter Lee Younger, his son Travis, his wife and Travis’ mother Ruth, sister Beneatha, and mother/grandmother Lena, called simply “Mama” in the play. Walter is ambitious and wants to move out of his small and run-down home and find a better job than a chauffeur for the kind of man he wishes he could be.

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," illustrates the irony of the cumulation of the American dream as it begins to crumble. The Youngers desperately pursue this American dream, hoping for opportunities of prosperity, upward social mobility, and the hope that their next generation should thrive unlike theirs. Working together, Hughes’ lines of his poem reflect the dreams of Hansberry’s characters and through this parallel, shows the effects on the Younger family when their long-awaited dreams are deferred by endless economic and family hardships as well as arduous racial boundaries. “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” (Hughes 2-3).

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Langston Hughes was an American poem born in the early nineteen hundreds, who became known as the leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He published many poems that brought light to the life of people of color in the twentieth century. There are three poems that the speakers are used to portray three major themes of each poem. Racism, the American Dream, and Hopes are all the major themes that Hughes uses to highlight the average life of a person of color. Theme for English B,” “Harlem,” and “Let America Be America Again” were three of Hughes’s poems that was selected to underline the themes.

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Therefore, the whole theme about this poem is everything is a mystery and a question and it will take years to potentially to find an answer. To begin, Langston shows in his first stanza his extreme miss for Africa and how much his history as an African American man has changed ever since his ancestors are officially part of the United states. Langston begins stating “ So long, So far away Is Africa. Not even memories alive Save those that history books create.” Langston explains how

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