Anh Vu (Maia)
Professor Tredore
ENG-102
6 Feb 2017
Langston Hughes’s Blues
The Harlem Renaissance marks an unforgettable time period when the world fell in love with African American culture through music, art, and literature. “The Weary Blues,” by Langston Hughes is one of the most influential pieces of literature during the time. Moving to New York during the Renaissance, Hughes found himself immersed into a cultural hub, in which he embraced its beauty. Through his experience, the poet absorbed the folk culture and turned it into art. Hughes’s use of the image of a piano and poetic devices enhances the effects of the Blues, providing a healing effect as well as uniting people from all corners of life.
The piano plays an important role in delivering musical elements as well as emotions to the audience. Hughes, in “The Weary Blues,” brings the instrument to life through personification. Jennifer Bouchard, in “Literary Context in Poetry,” states that the moaning piano emphasizes and intensifies “the musical effect of the poem” (1). By giving the piano life, the poet introduces another voice to the audience; the subtle voice harmonizes with the singers beautifully, accentuating the singer’s true talent. Agreeing with Bouchard’s point of view, Hartmut Grandel also points out how “the call-and-response structure” Hughes uses in the poem not only brings beats and rhythms to the poem, but also gives insight looks into the Blues singer’s mind:
The call-and-response structure of the poem is in evidence in the dialogue between the Blues singer and the piano, “He played a few chords then he sang some more–“. . . . The reassuring beat of black music, which, according to Hughes, connects the singer with a central life force, is heard in the Blues singer’s playing as well: “Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor”. . . . This rhythm gives assurance that the singer will overcome his momentary weariness and will discover in himself new sources of strength.
Even though the explanation behind the sorrows of the singer is not mentioned in the poem, Grandel believes that it is a result of the immigration of the singer to the big city. Being miles away from home, singing Blues is the only way to relieve himself of this grief. He poured his heart out at night and then left in the morning to “find some sleep” (Grandel). This process evokes emotions, and empathy from readers who are in a similar situations. For instance, people who immigrate to different cities, or even different countries, to find jobs in order to support their families. These individuals do not mind working long hours into the night. The poem has a therapeutic effect. Its comforting melody soothes the migrants, as if it understands the solitude they are experiencing.
Furthermore, critics are impressed with the way Hughes achieves the feel of Blues music through the use of a variety of literary devices. By using rhymed couplets, Hughes successfully replicates the tempo of Blues music (Bouchard 1). Hughes uses poetic devices “such as alliteration, ‘Droning a drowsy…’ and onomatopoeia, ‘thump, thump, thump…’ ” (Bouchard 1). This creates a continuous flow throughout the poem, bringing the music to life. In an article by Steven C. Tracy, the featured writer notices the way Hughes manipulates the lines and molds the style of the stanzas to transform the poem. Tracy believes that “the vaudeville Blues structure” noticeably influences the poem. By keeping the rhymed couplets separated, Hughes “heightened dramatization to the words after the manner of the vaudeville Blues singer” (Tracy 90).
The spirit of Blues is captured in the words of Hughes, but is more than just Traditional Blues. Hughes explores a different spectrum of Blues: the oral Bbues. Phrases like “O Blues!” (Hughes 11) and “Sweet Blue!” (14) are inserted into poem, breaking up the description of the singer, and accentuating the dedication and emotion coming out of the performance (Bouchard 1). Another point made by Bouchard is how Hughes injects song lyrics into the second half of the poem, bringing out the “African American southern dialect” that successfully captures the essence of the Blues. Hughes uses lines like “Ain’t got nobody in all this world, / Ain’t got nobody but ma self” (19-20) and “I ain’t happy no mo’/And I wish that I had died” (29-30) to solidify the speaker’s experience of the Blues performance as well as the impact the music has on the artist and his audience (Bouchard 1). Slangs such as “Ain’t” (19, 20, 29), “ma self” (20), and “no mo’ ”(30) emphasize the southern background of the artist. Furthermore, the gloomy Hughes’s use of poetic devices brings the Blues performance closer and closer to the readers, as if they were on the street of Lenox Avenue.
Martin Ponce takes up a fascinating point of view on the work of Langston Hughes, specifically on how he brings people together with his art. Ponce dissects many Blues works of Hughes, hoping to see if he can “reclaim a sense of queerness” (3). The “queerness” that Ponce mentions is merely its literal meaning. It is the sense of innovative forms that Hughes takes during his time of developing as an African-American poets at the time. Ponce notices how the poem, “The Weary Blues”, consists of two voices. One is the speaker’s voice, and the other is the Blues singer’s voice. The way Hughes uses these voices helps elevate the poem, making it stands out from all the other folk poems.
Hughes drops the framing apparatus that kept the two voices in “The Weary Blues” at least mostly distinct. In the process, he dissolves the formal and linguistic distance between himself and the culture that has produced the blues. The “I’s” of the persona and the bluesman become inextricable from one another. It is this self-projection into the poem that reveals Hughes’s identification with black working-class culture. Rather than hover around the edges of the blues performance, the “I” of the unframed blues poem is thrown into the space of the blues and addresses us from “inside” that space (Ponce 5).
Therefore, the speaker of the poem appears to fully emerge into the blues performance rather than mindlessly watching it. Ponce also addresses that Hughes uses this method to prevent the reader from viewing the work from any other points of views. Many perceive this as Hughes’ effort of closing the gap between folk tradition and literature, viewing “black folk just as human”. It does not matter whether one is black or not, or whether one has the same heritage as the other person, one ought to receive all the emotions the poem evokes or to reject all of it (Ponce 5). The pain is universal, it does not discriminate against one’s skin color, it affects everyone just as hard.
Keith Leonard talks about the ingenious usage of repetitions, closures, and rhyme schemes that Hughes uses in his poem. It transforms a normal twelve-bar blues stanza into a ballad. Using the rhymed couplets, along with “the third line of closure, and the aab rhyme scheme”, Hughes successfully turns the stanza into a beautiful “ballad of the oral and written traditions of Americans, African Americans, and the British” (10). Therefore, the poem powerfully evokes a great sense of art, unifying different communities among the readers. Leonard states ,“the overlap of artistic selves in ways that produce an affirming individual identity derived from the existential individualism of blues music itself” (11). Hughes successfully becomes the communal factor through his work as he brings the blues community, the ballad community, and the poetic community together. He brilliantly achieves what Leonard calls “alternative cultural meanings” (11). Through the communal voice of the speaker, Hughes denies that blackness is the antidote of refinement, rejects the exclusiveness of “concomitant sense of the universality of whiteness” (Leonard 11). Hughes, once again, brings to the readers a sense of equality. No matter who one is, where one comes from, there will always be someone out there with different background, experiencing the same pain, ready to sympathize.
Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” paints a calming Blues performance on the street of Harlem city at night. The poem truly represents the beauty of the Harlem Renaissance. By using a variety of poetic devices like: alliteration, repetition, personification,
Works Cited
Bouchard, Jennifer. “Literary Contexts In Poetry: Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues.” Understanding Literature — Literary Contexts in Poetry & Short Stories, Great Neck Publishing, 2008, pp.1. Literary Reference Center. Web. 12 Jan. 2017.
Grandel, Hartmut. “The Role of Music in the Self-Reflexive Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance.” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 218. Detroit: Gale, 2009. N.pag. Literature Resource Center. Web. 16 Jan. 2017.
Hughes, Langston. “The Weary Blues”. Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, 12th ed, edited by Greg Johnson and Thomas R. Arp, Wadsworth Inc, 2015, pp. 942–43.
Leonard, Keith D. “‘To Make a Poet Black’: Constructing an Ethnic Poetics in Harlem Renaissance Poetry.” Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights, University of Virginia Press, 2006, pp. 81-117. JSTOR, Web. 18 Jan. 2017.
Ponce, Martin Joseph. “Langston Hughes’s Queer Blues.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 4, 2005, p. 505+. Literature Resource Center, Web. 18 Jan. 2017.
Tracy, Steven C. “To the Tune of Those Weary Blues: The Influence of the Blues Tradition in Langston Hughes’s Blues Poems.” MELUS, vol. 8, no. 3, 1981, pp. 73–98. JSTOR, Web. 18 Jan. 2017.