The Full Text of “Daybreak in Alabama”
The Full Text of “Daybreak in Alabama”
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“Daybreak in Alabama” Introduction
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Composed during the era of segregation in the United States, “Daybreak in Alabama” expresses a deep yearning for unity in a racially divided world. Langston Hughes, one of the foremost poets of the Harlem Renaissance, first published the poem in 1940 in a journal called Unquote. The poem's speaker imagines someday writing music about the dawn in Alabama, and in it celebrating the diversity that exists both within nature and among human beings. Through this musical metaphor, the speaker presents racial equality and harmony as natural and beautiful.
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“Daybreak in Alabama” Summary
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The speaker envisions one day becoming a songwriter of color and writing some music about the sunrise in Alabama. The speaker's music will include beautiful songs that rise out of the ground like mist rises from a swamp and that fall from the sky like gentle droplets of water. The speaker lists the diverse things that this music will contain: very tall trees, the smell of pine, the scent of red clay that's wet from the rain, long red necks, faces that are bright red like poppy flowers, brown arms, and the eyes of black and white people looking like field daisies. The speaker will also sing about white, black, brown, and yellow hands, and hands the color of red clay. The hands that the speaker plans to sing about will be touching all people with kindness and also touching each other as naturally as the dew falls in that early morning music, when the speaker finally gets to be a songwriter of color and write music about sunrise in Alabama.
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“Daybreak in Alabama” Themes
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Racial Unity and Harmony
“Daybreak in Alabama” boldly imagines a future of peace, unity, and cooperation between all races. The poem’s speaker expresses a wish to someday write music about the dawn in Alabama, and to include in this music images of people of different races living together in harmony. Such unity, the poem implies, is as natural as “the scent of pine needles” or “the smell of red clay after rain.” Written during the era of segregation in the American South, the poem speaks to the longing for a fresh start—a “daybreak”—in which people of all races will overcome prejudice and “[t]ouch each other natural as dew.”
In describing what the “music about / Daybreak in Alabama” will be like, the speaker first focuses on images of natural diversity. The speaker wants to fill this music with varied sights, scents, and colors from nature, including “tall trees,” “pine needles,” and “red clay.” These “songs,” the speaker says, will seem to “ris[e] out of the ground like swamp mist / And fall[] out of heaven like soft dew.” In other words, they will gently, peacefully, and easily emerge from nature itself. The music the speaker wishes to write won't simply describe what Alabama is like, but will actually come from and be part of Alabama.
The speaker then mentions including images of different skin colors in these songs, and in doing so implies that human diversity is similarly natural and beautiful—and that all people are part of the same land from which this music will emerge. The speaker will “put white hands / And black hands and brown and yellow hands / And red clay earth hands in” the song of Alabama, placing human beings of various skin colors side by side. The more literal “harmony” of music thus also becomes a metaphor for the figurative harmony that the speaker envisions someday existing between different races.
Again, it's important to remember that Hughes was writing in a racially segregated America. The poem’s image of all these different hands “touching everybody with kind fingers” as easily and gently as dew touches the morning grass is all the more striking given that, when the poem was first published, Black people often couldn’t even sit on the same benches or drink from the same water fountains as white people. The speaker hopes for a world where racial harmony is seen as something normal and natural, but the focus on “daybreak” highlights that this vision of racial harmony is not a reality yet. In other words, the speaker’s hope for a new beginning, a new dawn, of racial unity in Alabama speaks to the necessity of racial harmony while also reminding readers that this utopian vision of unity has yet to be achieved.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-23
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Daybreak in Alabama”
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Lines 1-3
When I get ...
... Daybreak in AlabamaThe speaker begins by introducing a dream, or a vision for the future: that of being a composer and writing songs about Alabama mornings.
The text we're using in this guide sticks to that of the original poem, though Hughes cut the word “colored” (a segregation-era term for Black people) in a later publication. In any case, its inclusion in this original version identifies the speaker as a person of color. It's also significant that the “daybreak” the speaker wants to write music about is in Alabama, one of the states in the American South where segregation laws keeping Black people separate from white people were especially strict. Together, these facts suggest that “daybreak” here refers not just to a literal sunrise but also to the speaker’s longing for a fresh start for race relations in the United States.
What’s more, the poem announces the speaker’s wish to compose music someday, when the speaker “get[s] to be” a “composer.” The fact that that wish lies in an indeterminate future implies that it is still a long way from being fulfilled.
Meanwhile, the colloquial phrase “I’m gonna write me,” common both in Southern slang and in African American Vernacular English, is appropriate given the poem’s setting. It also establishes the speaker’s tone as informal and even intimate, as if sharing a deeply personal wish with a close friend.
Adding to this feeling of informality is the fact that the lines have no regular meter; the poem is written in free verse, which keeps things feeling free-flowing and conversational. Enjambment adds to the effect, as the opening lines here spill right across the line breaks and help the poem pick up speed.
Just because the poem doesn't have a meter or rhyme scheme, however, doesn't mean that it lacks music. For example, the alliteration of sharp /c/ sounds in the phrase “colored composer” adds boldness to the speaker's vision and also helps underscore the speaker’s identity as a person of color.
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Lines 4-6
And I'm gonna ...
... like soft dew -
Lines 7-13
I'm gonna put ...
... field daisy eyes -
Lines 14-17
Of black and ...
... hands in it -
Lines 18-19
Touching everybody with ...
... natural as dew -
Lines 20-23
In that dawn ...
... In Alabama.
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“Daybreak in Alabama” Symbols
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Daybreak/Dawn
Morning and dawn symbolize hope and renewal in the poem. The speaker doesn't simply wish to write music about Alabama, but about the "[d]aybreak in Alabama"—which represents the speaker's wish to see a new beginning for race relations in America, a dawning of racial harmony and unity. The mentions of "dew" in the poem, which appears in the morning and typically evaporates by midday, adds to the symbolism here. That the speaker's song will be "like soft dew" suggests that it will be the signal of a new day in a more united world.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 3: “Daybreak in Alabama”
- Line 6: “And falling out of heaven like soft dew”
- Lines 19-20: “Touching each other natural as dew / In that dawn of music when I”
- Lines 22-23: “And write about daybreak / In Alabama.”
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“Daybreak in Alabama” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
"Daybreak in Alabama" uses alliteration to emphasize important moments and to simply give the poem a sense of musicality, one that evokes the beauty and harmony of nature.
For example, the phrase “colored composer” in line 1, which returns in line 21, underscores the speaker's identity as both "colored" (a dated term for Black) and an aspiring "composer." It draws attention to the speaker's aspiration to write harmonious and inclusive music.
Later on, the reader finds the phrase “tall tall trees,” with its alliteration reinforced by the epizeuxis of "tall." The crisp /t/ sounds again add subtle music to the image, and also underscore the impressive height of the trees. Such short moments of alliteration, like the consecutive /b/ sounds of “big brown arms” in line 12, pop up throughout the poem and highlight the speaker's idyllic vision of nature and people in harmony.
The use of alliteration, along with other sonic devices such as assonance and consonance, might also underline the unity of nature, how its distinct elements interact and harmoniously coexist. Note the /r/ sounds of "red clay after rain," for example, which reflect nature's delicate touch and highlight the relationship between the fresh-smelling ground to the rain that has touched it and made it wet. The assonance here (that shared long /ay/ sound in "clay" and "rain") adds to the effect.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 1: “colored composer”
- Line 4: “put,” “purtiest”
- Line 7: “tall tall trees”
- Line 9: “red,” “rain”
- Line 12: “big brown”
- Line 21: “colored composer”
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Assonance
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Metaphor
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Anaphora
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Repetition
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Enjambment
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Simile
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Asyndeton
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Polysyndeton
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"Daybreak in Alabama" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Colored
- Purtiest
- Dew
- Poppy colored
- Field daisy
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “When I get to be a colored composer”; Line 21: “Get to be a colored composer”)
In the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, this was a term used to refer to Black people in the United States. Though it was often the preferred term at the time Hughes was writing, the word is currently considered an ethnic slur. Hughes actually cut it from a later publication of the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Daybreak in Alabama”
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Form
With no fixed meter or rhyme scheme, “Daybreak in Alabama” doesn’t stick to any traditional formal structures. This lack of structure is interesting in itself, however. The poem is not divided into stanzas but instead composed of 23 lines of free verse running in one continuous block from start to finish. With the notable exception of the final end-stop, it also has a striking lack of punctuation.
This lack of form adds to the poem's plainspoken and casually intimate quality. Rather than a highly premeditated and formal declaration, the poem offers readers the impression of an outpouring that is spontaneous and straight from the heart.
The poem’s continuous, unpunctuated lines are also perhaps meant to evoke the smooth, natural flow of music. The poem flows on unimpeded from one image of nature to the next, reflecting how nature harmoniously brings all things together, and the speaker’s songs might do the same. It is possible that any punctuation marks, stanza divisions, or clear syntactic breaks would have disrupted this effect of a continuous and harmonious whole.
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Meter
“Daybreak in Alabama” has no consistent meter. It is written in free verse, which keeps things feeling casual and intimate—like the reader is listening to a friend talk about a dream.
The poem is filled with interesting rhythm, however, as Hughes plays with enjambments, stress patterns, and line lengths. For example, note the parallel spondees—poetic feet with two stressed syllables in a row—at the end of lines 5 and 6:
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dewThese pairs of stresses make these images of natural tranquility, gentleness, and peace all the more striking for the reader.
Like many writers of free verse, Hughes also varies line lengths to control the poem’s rhythm. Consider lines 10-13, each one short and with only three stresses apiece:
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyesThese lines create a rapid, accumulating rhythm. This rhythm, in turn, reinforces the impression of a spontaneous, ever-expanding list of items being folded one after the other into the inclusive harmony of nature.
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Rhyme Scheme
“Daybreak in Alabama” has no rhyme scheme. In fact, the poem does not contain any rhymes at all!
Traditional formal structures like rhyme can feel, at times, forced and artificial. In avoiding rhyme, the poem evokes the feeling of plain, spontaneous speech. The poem’s unrhymed, free verse lines make the speaker’s expression feel all the more genuine and authentic, as though the speaker is laying out a deep and earnest wish for a future free from racial prejudice.
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“Daybreak in Alabama” Speaker
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Given the speaker's wish to be a “colored composer,” it is fair enough to read the speaker as being the poet, Langston Hughes, himself: a Black artist who wrote often about racism and inequality.
The poem never explicitly states this, however, and Hughes in fact cut the word "colored" from a later publication of the poem. Readers can thus more generally assume that the speaker is a person who is living in, or intimately familiar with, Alabama during the era of racial segregation. The speaker comes across as someone who has witnessed the reality of racial prejudice, and who desperately yearns for a new dawn—a fresh start. The speaker might be an actual aspiring musical composer, or simply an idealist using the idea of music as a convenient metaphor for racial harmony.
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“Daybreak in Alabama” Setting
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“Daybreak in Alabama” has multiple settings, some of which are more ambiguous/metaphorical and others more concrete. Broadly speaking, the poem is set in the speaker’s present. The speaker imagines a future when they can write songs celebrating racial harmony, but that future, importantly, has yet to arrive within the world of the poem.
The content of the speaker’s songs, meanwhile, is more specifically set during some imagined future dawn when people of all races exist in harmony with nature and with one another. The specific mention of “[d]aybreak” represents a new beginning, when people might be free of racial prejudice and coexist in peace.
Of course, readers can also take Alabama, where "pine needles" and daisies grow, as the physical setting for this future utopia. The Alabama setting is appropriate, given the state’s history of slavery and strict policies of segregation at the time Hughes was writing.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Daybreak in Alabama”
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Literary Context
“Daybreak in Alabama” was initially published in the literary journal Unquote in 1940. The poem must have had a special importance to Langston Hughes, who later decided to include it as the last poem in his final book of poetry, The Panther and the Lash (1967).
Hughes was one of the leading poets of a period of literary and artistic history known as the Harlem Renaissance. This period saw a flourishing of Black art, literature, and culture centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. At this time, prominent poets like Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer tried to find new ways of expressing Black experiences.
Hughes in particular was known for his use of colloquial speech in his free verse or jazz- and blues-inspired poems, as well as his attempts to give expression to a collective Black experience in America. He admired Walt Whitman, who is sometimes known as the father of free verse in American poetry and who similarly tried to represent a collective American experience.
“Daybreak in Alabama” brings together some of Hughes's go-to themes: music, ethnic identity, racial prejudice, and solidarity. At the same time, “Daybreak in Alabama” differs from much of Hughes's work in important ways. For one thing, many of Hughes’s other poems use music to cultivate a distinctive Black literary voice—as in his poems “Dream Variations” and “Morning-After,” inspired by jazz and blues music. In “Daybreak in Alabama,” music appears instead as a way of imagining a harmony that might exist across racial boundaries. Similarly, whereas many of Hughes’s poems express uniquely Black experiences or themes of pride, resilience, and defiance, this poem expresses hope for a future where all racial conflict might come to an end.
Historical Context
Though not published until 1940, the poem carries over much of the passion and energy from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. This movement added vigor to struggles for Black American civil rights in the first half of the 20th century.
This poem was, however, written well before the later civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which would seek to bring institutional discrimination to an end by granting Black Americans equal rights under the law. At the time Hughes was writing, segregation was still in full force. Across the United States, Black Americans lived as second-class citizens, kept separate from the white majority population and forced to contend with rampant racism, disenfranchisement, and marginalization. Segregation and discrimination were especially enforced in the Deep South, including in states like Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, and Mississippi.
Today, it is perhaps too easy to forget just how radical a poem like “Daybreak in Alabama” must have been to contemporary audiences. In Hughes’s time, many would have seen the idea of different colored hands “[t]ouching” as inappropriate or strange. By suggesting that racial unity and harmony is actually “natural as dew,” the poem makes the provocative point that it is the segregationist system which is, in fact, unnatural.
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More “Daybreak in Alabama” Resources
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External Resources
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Overview of Jim Crow segregation — Find out more about the laws and policies of segregation in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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A Musical Adaptation of the Poem — Listen to this musical adaptation of Hughes's poem composed by Ricky Ian Gordon and sung by Audra MacDonald.
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A Short Biography of Langston Hughes — Find out more about Langston Hughes through this biography covering his life and work.
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The Poem Out Loud — Listen to an interpretation of "Daybreak of Alabama" by Tyree Walker, an actor from Alabama.
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The Harlem Renaissance — Learn more about the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Langston Hughes
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