The Full Text of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
1I’ve known rivers:
2I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
3My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
4I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
5I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
6I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
7I 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.
8I’ve known rivers:
9Ancient, dusky rivers.
10My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
The Full Text of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
1I’ve known rivers:
2I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
3My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
4I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
5I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
6I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
7I 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.
8I’ve known rivers:
9Ancient, dusky rivers.
10My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
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“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Introduction
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"The Negro Speaks of River" was written in 1920 by the American poet Langston Hughes. One of the key poems of a literary movement called the "Harlem Renaissance," "The Negro Speaks of River" traces black history from the beginning of human civilization to the present, encompassing both triumphs (like the construction of the Egyptian pyramids) and horrors (like American slavery). The poem argues that the black "soul" has incorporated all of this historical experience, and in the process has become "deep." The poem thus suggests that black cultural identity is continuous, that it stretches across the violence and displacement of slavery to connect with the past—and that black people have made vital, yet often neglected contributions to human civilization.
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“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Summary
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I have been familiar with a lot of rivers. I have been familiar with rivers that are as old as the planet itself, older than blood pumping through people's veins.
My soul has become very deep, just like the rivers I know.
I went swimming in the Euphrates River when human civilization was still young and even sunrises were new. I built my home near the Congo River and its murmuring waters helped me fall asleep. I saw the Nile and helped build the Pyramids on its shore. And I heard the Mississippi River sound as if it were singing, when Abraham Lincoln traveled on it to New Orleans. And I’ve seen the surface of that muddy river, like a person's chest, reflect the sunset, turning gold.
I've been familiar with a lot of rivers: very old, dark rivers.
My soul has become very deep, just like the rivers I know.
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“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Themes
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Blackness, Perseverance, and Cultural Identity
"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" stretches from the earliest moments of human civilization all the way to American slavery, emphasizing that black people have both witnessed and participated in the key moments of human history. In the face of centuries of slavery and oppression in America, the poem’s speaker asserts the perseverance of black cultural roots. The poem argues that people of African descent have not simply been present for all of human history, they have been a guiding force shaping civilization. In this sense, the poem is an ode to black perseverance.
The speaker of the poem acts as a representative figure. After all, the title is "The Negro Speaks of River," not "A Negro…" (At the time of the poem’s writing, "Negro" was a common term that wasn't considered offensive). In this sense, the speaker models how he or she thinks the black community as a whole should relate to its history and culture.
As an almost mythical figure, the speaker emphasizes the depth of his or her experience, which turns out to represent the entire history of black people. The speaker has "known rivers ancient as the world," and "bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young." The Euphrates is a river in the Middle East associated with an area called the Cradle of Civilization, where human agriculture first began. As such, the speaker is saying he or she was present at the very start of human history, implying that black people have helped shape the world as we know it. Invoking this deep history establishes the fact that black experience extends as far back as any other people's, creating a profound sense of community and connection between black people.
In fact, the speaker has "known rivers … older than the flow of human blood in human veins"—suggesting that black history existed even before human existence. This connects the speaker to the natural world. On one hand, such a connection could be considered problematic, since racist discourses often oppose "civilized" white populations to "natural" or "uncivilized" black peoples. (Because of these racist ideas, Hughes himself veered away from such characterizations in his later work.) On the other hand, this connection can be seen as asserting a sense of wisdom and peace (such as when the Congo "lull[s]" the speaker to sleep) in the face of slavery and oppression, which the poem alludes to later on.
In addition to the speaker's deep historical experience, he or she has also witnessed recent events, such as "the singing of the Mississippi"—a river on the American continent, thousands of miles away from the Euphrates—when "Abe Lincoln went to down to New Orleans." The line alludes to a famous trip Lincoln took down the Mississippi as a young man, which exposed him to the evils of slavery. The speaker invokes these examples to show the breadth of black experience—which includes moments of triumph, like building the pyramids, and moments of trial and tribulation, like slavery and the Civil War. In all these moments, black experience has helped define the course of history.
As the speaker outlines these distant, disparate experiences, he or she stresses that they are not disconnected events. They form one uninterrupted experience, like a river. Rivers represent continuity: they cannot be chopped up into discrete chunks. Furthermore, the speaker’s experience is “deep” like a river, suggesting permanence, perseverance, and inner strength. Black people have persevered through the most difficult times. Like a river, black history keeps flowing.
This argument holds special importance for the American black community for two related reasons. First, the slave trade cut off black people from their homes, their cultures, their families—and, ultimately, their history. Yet the speaker asserts a continuous history despite that cutting-off. Second, American narratives of history have usually focused on white people, effectively erasing black experience. So, in presenting the speaker’s knowledge as stretching across continents and historical periods, the poem portrays a different narrative—one that acknowledges black history.
The speaker argues that black identity and accomplishment are so powerful they can cross the gaps that slavery created, reconnecting with lost ancestors and traditions. In this way, the poem proudly portrays the depth of black historical experience.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
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Lines 1-2
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.The first 2 lines of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" establish the poem’s themes and its formal pattern. The poem begins with the speaker directly addressing the reader, speaking about his or her experience: "I’ve known rivers," the speaker claims. At first, this doesn’t seem to be all that impressive or revelatory: after all, more or less everyone has seen a river. But over the course of the poem’s 10 lines, the speaker’s apparently unremarkable statement will transform into a bold assertion about black cultural identity and history. As the poem progresses, all three words in the poem’s opening line, "I," "know," and "river," take on new, expanded meanings.
The speaker begins this transformation in the poem’s second line, where he or she announces that there is something special about these rivers. The lines have a parallel construction: both open with the anaphoric phrase "I’ve known rivers," which serves as a refrain for the poem. This encourages the reader to see the second line as an expansion of the first line. More specifically, the second line expands the reader's understanding of the "rivers." They are "ancient as the world"—in other words, as old the earth itself.
The simile (the rivers are "ancient as the world" suggests that the reader shouldn’t focus on the rivers as literal bodies of water, but instead on their relationship to other things: in this case, to the history of the world. As the line progress, the speaker also measures the rivers against human life itself, noting that they are "older than the flow of human blood in human veins."
The second half of line 2 makes use of synecdoche. The speaker is saying that these rivers are older than the human species, but he or she represents humans through one part of their bodies, the blood that flows in their veins. This flowing blood resembles the flowing of water in a river. In this way, the speaker suggests that human beings are like rivers, that they contain rivers.
The first two lines of the poem are visually arresting: the first line is short, almost terse; the next line spills across the page, a full 23 syllables long. Each of these lines is end-stopped, a pattern that will hold throughout the poem (the poem contains no enjambment). The reader also notices, immediately, that the poem lacks any set meter. And it also does not have a rhyme scheme. Indeed, throughout the poem, the speaker avoids using rhyme almost entirely. In other words, the poem is written in free verse. It thus faces a challenge: how to make the poem feel musical, feel poetic, in the absence of a set meter or rhyme scheme.
These lines suggest how the poem meets that challenge: using devices like parallelism and refrain to create music. It also relies heavily on assonance and consonance. Line 2 contains 13 assonant and consonant sounds—it almost overflows with sonic play and pleasure. However, the speaker largely avoids alliteration, perhaps because alliteration is so closely linked to European forms of poetry. Indeed, the speaker’s rejection of meter and rhyme might be seen as part of a broader rejection of white poetic traditions, an attempt to develop an independent black poetic voice, that does not rely on white models to articulate black culture and identity.
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Line 3
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
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Lines 4-6
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. -
Line 7
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.
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Lines 8-10
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
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“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Symbols
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Rivers
When the speaker of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" first mentions rivers in the poem’s opening line, they seem like literal things, actual bodies of waters. However, as the poem progresses, the rivers gradually accumulate symbolic weight. Sure, they are real rivers, but they also stand in metonymically for the cultures that have risen and fallen on their banks—from the ancient Sumerian culture that flourished along the Euphrates to the slave culture of the American south. In this sense, each individual river the poem mentions serves as a symbol or a metonym for those cultures.
More broadly, the rivers themselves come to serve as symbols for human history. This symbolism reveals important things about the speaker’s understanding of that history. Rivers are continuous and unbroken: they cannot be chopped up into discrete parts. The speaker understands history in similar terms—as a continuous experience that stretches from the distant past into the present. In turn, this means that black identity is not defined by the traumas it has suffered under slavery, Jim Crow laws, and American racism. Instead, black identity stretches across these traumas into the distant past, to cultures and traditions that the slave trade interrupted. As symbols, the “rivers” thus present a fundamentally hopeful view of black culture. It is strong and powerful enough to survive the traumas of slavery, connecting black people to a past they might otherwise have irreparably lost.
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Human Blood in Human Veins
In line 2, the speaker describes the "rivers" that he or she has "known" as "older than the flow of human blood in human veins." In this case, the "blood" serves as a symbol or synecdoche for human beings themselves. In other words, the speaker is saying that the rivers are older than humans as a species. The symbol raises an interesting possibility, which complicates the way the poem talks about the rivers. Elsewhere in the poem, rivers serve as metonyms for particular human cultures. More broadly, they symbolize human history itself. But here the speaker suggests that the rivers should not be simply or exclusively associated with human culture: they exist beyond, before, and outside human beings. As a symbol, then, “human blood in human veins” indicates the limits of humanity. It suggests that the things the poem describes have an existence beyond their participation in human culture. In turn, this seems to grant the speaker a sense of wisdom and peace, causing his or her soul to "grow[] deep."
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The Soul
In lines 3 and 10, the speaker claims that his or her "soul has grown deep like the rivers." In a sense, this is the poem's key claim. It suggests that the speaker has internalized the deep history and experience that the rivers embody, a history that stretches all the way to the dawn of human civilization. The speaker's soul thus takes on unusual characteristics. In Christianity, a soul is the part of a person that survives after death: it is the thing that God judges, either raising it into Heaven or casting it down into Hell. In other words, it’s a private, personal thing, the very essence of a human being. It's marked by the course of that person’s life, the good and bad that they have done.
But the speaker’s soul in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" seems much grander and broader than that. It encompasses not only the speaker's individual life, but the whole history of black culture. In this sense, the speaker's use of the word "soul" echoes how it was used by the black sociologist W. E. B. DuBois, in his 1903 classic The Souls of Black Folk. For DuBois, the soul is not a personal possession. Instead, it is a symbol of black culture more broadly, the spirit and essence of the people. The speaker’s use of the word "soul" in lines 3 and 10 thus serves not only as a reference to his or her personal experience; it also represents the experience and identity of the speaker’s culture. In other words, it serves as a symbol of that culture.
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“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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End-Stopped Line
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is a highly end-stopped poem: indeed, it contains no enjambments. This would be unusual for any poem, since almost all poems contain at least a few enjambments—but it is especially unusual for a poem written in free verse, that is, a poem that doesn’t have meter or a rhyme scheme.
Free verse poems usually rely on enjambment to create surprise and rhythm. However, the speaker of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is not particularly interested in that kind of surprise. Instead, the poem dramatizes the speaker’s deep, continuous knowledge of black life and culture, stretching back to the beginning of human history. There is no need for surprise or uncertainty here because the speaker already knows everything he or she needs to know. The poem’s end-stops thus contribute to the sense that the speaker is self-assured, confident in his or her experience and knowledge.
Further, the speaker finds ways to make the end-stops themselves contribute to the poem’s rhythm. Five of the poem’s ten lines end with the word “rivers.” This creates a chiming music, to which the poem returns again and again as it moves through its long, discursive lines. The river becomes a point of rest and assurance, something that grounds the poem’s rhythm. In much the same way, the rivers that the speaker describes also ground his or her historical experience: because they are continuous, flowing, and consistent, they model the speaker's deep knowledge of black life and history.
The poem’s use of end-stop thus helps create a sense of music and rhythm in the absence of meter and rhyme. At the same time, it reinforces the speaker’s sense of confidence and self-assurance.
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Refrain
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Anaphora
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Parallelism
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Allusion
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Personification
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Metonymy
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Simile
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Synecdoche
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"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" 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.
- Ancient
- Deep
- Euphrates
- Congo
- Lulled
- Nile
- Raised
- Pyramids
- Mississippi
- Abe Lincoln
- Bosom
- Dusky
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Very old, prehistoric.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
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Form
"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is written in free verse, which means that it has no set rhyme scheme or metrical pattern. Sometimes its lines are very short; sometimes they are very long. For instance, the first line of the poem, "I’ve known rivers" contains just four syllables, while the second line has twenty-three. As a result, the poem's lines move like a river's current: sometimes full of energy and rushing forward, sometimes running slowly and softly.
Hughes also experiments with the length of its five stanzas. Stanzas 2 and 5 are only a single line, while the poem's third and central stanza extends to four lines. Stanzas 1 and 4, which employ the refrain "I've known rivers," have two lines. This pattern creates a kind of structural symmetry, much as in a blues song. In general, the poem's flowing, variable, free verse lines allow Hughes to find a poetic expression of the historical complexity of the black experience.
Throughout his career, Langston Hughes sought to find literary forms capable of expressing the depth and complexity of black experience. He often experimented with the blues, translating the musical genre into poetry. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" should be understood as part of this sustained attempt to develop black literary forms. It rejects white European poetic traditions as incapable of expressing black experience. Instead, its closest literary relative is the American poet Walt Whitman's experiments with free verse in poems like "I Hear America Singing." However, Hughes's free verse is even more flexible than Whitman's: its juxtapositions between very long and very short lines is more radical than Whitman’s consistently long lines.
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Meter
"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" does not have a set meter. Instead, it is written in free-verse. As a result the pattern of stresses with each line varies organically. For instance, the first line contains two stresses, an iamb (a duh DUH rhythm) and a trochee (a DUH duh rhythm):
I’ve known | rivers
It's also entirely possible to scan that first foot as a spondee (stressed-stressed):
I’ve known | rivers
The next line begins with the same rhythm, but then diverges from it, sometimes falling into an iambic rhythm, then falling out of it:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
In the absence of a set meter, the poem’s rhythms flow like a river: sometimes accelerating and finding a groove, sometimes slowing down, becoming languorous and luxurious. It's possible to see such an effect in the way line 2 swoops through a series of unstressed syllables ("ancient | as the world"), before falling into a groove of iambs ("and old- | er than | the flow"). In this way, the poem not only describes rivers, it imitates their distinctive rhythms, the way they flow.
Since the meter (such as iambic pentameter) usually used in English poetry is a white, European form, rejecting meter allows the poem to develop an independent set of poetic resources that reflect black cultural traditions. However, just because the poem doesn’t have an established meter doesn’t mean that it lacks music. In the place of meter, Hughes uses a raft of poetic devices to give the poem a feel of rhythm and music, such as refrain, parallelism, and anaphora (among others). These devices allow the poem to develop its own music, its own rhythm—which emerges from its specific language, rather than a pre-established metrical scheme.
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Rhyme Scheme
"The Negro Speaks of River" does not have a rhyme scheme: it is written in free verse, a poetic form that avoids using meter and rhyme in a regular way. But this poem goes farther than many free verse poems. Many such poems use rhyme casually, occasionally, to underscore important points. ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a good example: it contains rhyming couplets, which serve as a refrain for the poem). By contrast, "The Negro Speaks of River" contains almost no rhyme. There are a few occasional internal slant rhymes, like “rivers” and "older" in line 2 and "me" and "sleep" in line 5. There’s just one end-rhyme in the poem, "above it" and "sunset" in lines 6-7, and it's a barely perceptible slant rhyme.
The poem arguably rejects rhyme so thoroughly because rhyme is often associated with the European tradition of poetry. In fact, the rise of rhyme's popularity historically coincided with European colonialism and the slave trade. In rejecting rhyme, the speaker rejects a specific period of European culture, a period in which European countries did horrifying violence to black traditions and communities. The poem works hard to develop its own music, a music independent from this European tradition, turning instead to devices like anaphora, parallelism, and refrain.
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“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Speaker
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The speaker of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is presented as a representative figure: the poem’s title, after all, is "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" rather than "A Negro..." The speaker is a model for the black community. The speaker shows how that community can or should relate to its own history, its traumas, and its triumphs. The speaker's relationship to that history is deep and continuous. He or she was present for the earliest moments of human history, bathing in "the Euphrates"—a river in the Fertile Crescent, where human civilization began—"when dawns were young." But the speaker also heard "the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans," a reference to a trip that future President Lincoln took as a young man, which exposed him to the evils of slavery. The speaker’s experience comprehends the very ancient and the very recent. Further, it includes the triumphs of black culture, like the construction of the pyramids, alongside its greatest trauma, slavery.
The speaker’s experience suggests several things at once. First, that black people have been key participants in human civilization, and that their contributions should not be ignored. Second, that black culture is strong and resilient—resilient enough to overcome the traumas of slavery, which cut off black people from their families, traditions, and countries. As a representative figure, then, the speaker suggests that the black community should take pride in this vibrancy and resilience, turning to its history as a source of identity in the face of racism.
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“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Setting
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Over the course of 10 lines, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" moves across the whole breadth of human history and much of the Earth’s geography. The speaker’s earliest experiences take place alongside the Euphrates, a river in the Fertile Crescent, where human civilization began. The speaker "bathed" in the river "when dawns were young." His or her most recent experiences take place across an ocean and several millennia later, on the Mississippi, where the speaker hears the river’s "singing" as Abe Lincoln travels down it. In between, the speaker makes pit stops at the Nile and the Congo rivers in Africa. These are sites of major black cultural accomplishments: the construction of the pyramids and the Kingdom of Kongo, an African kingdom.
The poem’s setting is thus as broad as human history itself, stretching from its very earliest moments to its recent past. And its setting is as wide as black people’s presence across the globe: from the Middle East, to Africa, to the Americas. This broad variety of times and places becomes part of the poem’s point: that black culture is vibrant, continuous, and accomplished. The speaker thinks that black people should take pride in this, and that white historians should not ignore or disparage it.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
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Literary Context
Langston Hughes wrote "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" when he was only 17. According to legend (that Hughes himself promoted), he was taking a train from St. Louis to Mexico City to visit his father. When the train crossed the Mississippi, inspiration struck and the poem poured out.
Whether the story is true or not, the poem quickly became one of the most famous documents from the Harlem Renaissance, a literary movement that flourished in the 1920s in Harlem, a neighborhood in upper Manhattan. In the Harlem Renaissance, black artists, writers, and intellectuals developed distinctively black literary and artistic forms. The literature of the Harlem Renaissance celebrates black life and black traditions and protests the virulent racism of the 1920s. Its key literary figures include Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston.
In "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," Hughes rejects many of the central traditions of English poetry, like meter and rhyme, which are often associated with white Europeans. Instead, the poem tries to develop a distinctly black literary voice to express the distinctiveness of black culture.
Here, Hughes draws on the free verse developed in the 19th century by the American poet Walt Whitman. Yet Hughes's take on free verse is arguably even more radical than Whitman's, with greater variety in line length and stanza structure. In using a form so closely associated with American poetry—Whitman is often considered the father of American poetry—Hughes insists that he's as much an American poet, and as much an American, as Whitman himself.
In this sense, Hughes departs from other poets who worked alongside him during the Harlem Renaissance. Where Hughes rejected white poetic traditions, poets like Claude McKay experimented with European literary forms like the sonnet (see, for instance, McKay’s Petrarchan sonnet, "If We Must Die"). McKay's poem makes a different formal argument than Hughes's. It argues that black writers are capable of outdoing giants of European poetic tradition, like John Milton and Francesco Petrarch, on their own turf. Hughes, however, suggests that such competition is unnecessary and ultimately unproductive. According to Hughes, it's more important to develop an independent black poetic tradition, one that asserts the vibrancy and persistence of black culture.
Historical Context
Because it stretches from the dawn of human history to American slavery, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" has an extremely broad historical context. Indeed, its context might be said to be human history itself. In engaging such a broad context, the poem challenges the dominant historical narratives of its time.
These narratives were assembled by white historians and tended to ignore or slight the accomplishments of black people in human history. Indeed, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel claimed in his Philosophy of History (1837) that the African continent (and by extension, black people) were simply outside human history and didn't contribute in any way to the political and cultural development of human society. The poem asks its readers to reconsider that history and to recognize the centrality of black people in human history and culture.
In doing so, the poem engages with a more specific historical context: the early 20th century in America. At the time the poem was written, in the 1920s, many black people were fleeing the American South—with its discriminatory laws and racist violence—for new lives in cities like New York and Chicago. Once in the North, they found new and vibrant black communities. (They also encountered much of the racism and restrictions they had tried to leave behind in the South.)
Many of these migrants were only one or two generations removed from slavery, which thus remained part of the living memory of these communities. Slavery had torn people from their traditions, their languages, and their religions. One of the key challenges facing black communities was to reconstruct a sense of identity—to reclaim the parts of its history that had been destroyed or obscured by slavery. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" attempts to answer this challenge by presenting a speaker whose experience includes slavery but also stretches far beyond it.
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More “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Resources
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External Resources
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The Harlem Renaissance — A history of the Harlem Renaissance from the Poetry Foundation, with links to key poems from the movement.
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Langston Hughes Biography — A detailed biography of Langston Hughes from the Poetry Foundation.
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The Poems (We Think) We Know: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes — A detailed analysis of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" from Alexandra Socarides.
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Langston Hughes Reads "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" — Hear Langston Hughes read his poem himself.
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On "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" — A collection of scholarly responses to "The Negro Speaks of Rivers."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Langston Hughes
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