The Weary Blues, By Langston Hughes
Music is an art form and cultural activity whose medium is sound organized in time and can help people during hard times to express their emotions and be a stress relief. The poem, “The Weary Blues”, by Langston Hughes, takes place in Harlem during the 1920s where “Negro Movement” or as we know it today, The Harlem Renaissance exploded. In this poem, Hughes is describing an African American man that is playing the piano and singing an old blues number. Considering the tough time, the African American society was going through and still having to deal with the effects of slavery, music, more specifically, The Blues, become almost an escape for them. The music helped the African American slaves to make the misery just a little less hellish and The Blues continued on to help people convey their sorrow and pain. In the poem, Hughes is able to make the audience feel the depression and sadness in the poem through the use of repetition, similes, and tone.
From the beginning of the poem, Hughes is portraying a very sad and lonely tone. He said, “Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play”, and from that line the audience can already tell that this person is drunk, he cannot walk straight as he listens to the music. At a time and atmosphere like the 1920s, people would drown their pain into booze to make themselves feel better, but the most depressing part is the racist remark. In the poem, the word ‘Negro” is repeated and from the phrases like “his ebony hands” and “black man’s soul” the audience can understand the clear hardship of a person of color that always had his color describe him. The African Americans had to go face being identified by their color, not that they are just a simple “man” but a “negro” or “black” man. The flow of the poem also very music like, making the readers feel like they are with him in the person, seeing and hearing the sounds and music. Hughes repeats the phase “He did a lazy sway” to give the readers almost a back and forth feeling like we are swaying with the music, it is like reading a blue song and not a poem. His use of onomatopoeia also makes the reader feel like they are there experiencing it with the. For example, “Thump, thump, thump”, he is describing the musician playing the piano and how his whole body plays the music, his foot his stomping on the ground to keep up with the beat.
Through the use of similes, the author creates clear images that is portrayed to the readers. In line 13, “He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool”, he is saying that the musician is playing the piano like a fool, drowned in his own sorrow. Another simile he used was, line 35, “He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.”, saying how peaceful the sleep was. Sleeping like a rock is used when you have a great night of sleep but sleeping like he’s is dead has a very dark tone. This line set a very dark and depressing tone for the story because looking back into history, so many African American slaves were killed and abused. They preferred to be in a peaceful everlasting sleep rather than being tortured, raped, and abused every single day. Even after slavery ended, segregation was huge, the African Americans had to face one after another to end it. Throughout the whole poem, the author was using words like, “dull pallor”, “Droning”, “mellow croon”, “drowsy”, “sad raggy”, “frownin’”, that is indicating a sad life and he even says, “And I wish that I had died”. He does not want to live and through the music we can sense a lot of emotion and depression.
According to poets.org, “the Weary Blues. Langston Hughes’s first book, published by Knopf in 1926, is one of the high points of modernism and of what has come to be called the “Harlem Renaissance”. There has been a lot of issues that African Americans had to overcome so the African American literature was almost a new beginning to the New Negro movement. Artist of all over started to show their passions of literature, music, to express how they feel because “life ‘ain’t been no crystal stair’”. Reading this poem, I felt sympathy because all I can picture in my head was a dark, sad, night where you hear this very lonely and misery tune coming from a piano and a voice that’s singing with depression in his voice. I can almost hear the pain in his voice and the last line that says, “He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead”, really hit me deep. I was thinking maybe being dead is peaceful? And thinking back to slavery I can understand why someone would prefer it but its just extremely sad that even to this day, after protesting and fighting for so long, racism still exist. There are still innocent teenagers and young men being shot by the police for the color of their skin. I just wonder how many more years until there an end? How many more have to give their lives for there to be an end? How long will it take for everyone to just open their eyes and hearts? A lot of people in the 1920s was able to relate to the poem and turn to the mellow sounds of the blues to express themselves and drown out the pain with the music and even today we can relate to it and get lost into the blues that remind us of the strong African American fighters that are still fighting for equality.
Works Cited
Young, Kevin. “On Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues”. Poets.org. Web. February 05, 2015. < https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/langston-hughess-weary-blues>
Hughes, Langston. “The Weary Blues”. Poet.org. Web. 1994. <https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/weary-blues>
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