Tuesday, February 21

A little bit of literature

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

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.

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.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Vocabulary build-up

The transitive verb lull means “to cause to sleep or rest; soothe or calm; to soothe (a person or animal) by soft sounds or motions (especially in the phrase ‘lull to sleep’).”

In this context, the poet writes the noun bosom in a figurative form, as it means “the security and closeness likened to being held in a warm familial embrace.” Hughes meant to describe New Orleans’ welcomeness and sympathy. 

Comments

In the third week of the Black History Month, our literature Tuesday (sic) coincides with the Brazilian Carnival, a festival that transpires black traditions in the country. In this context, we present a piece of “The weary blues” of Langston Hughes, one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, which was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Langston Hughes is one of the most controversial names in the history of American poetry. To many readers of African descent, however, he is their poet laureate, the beloved author of poems steeped in the richness of African American culture. To many readers who love poetry and are also committed to the ideal of social and political justice, he is among the most eloquent American poets to have sung about the wounds caused by injustice. Hughes never sought to be all things to all people but rather aimed to create a body of work that epitomized the beauty and variety of the African American and the American experiences. In 1926, when he published his first volume of poems, “The Weary Blues”, he had already fused into his poetry its key technical commitment: the music of black Americans as the prime source and expression of their cultural truths. In these blues and jazz poems, Hughes wrote a fundamentally new kind of verse — one that told of the joys and sorrows, the trials and triumphs, of ordinary black folk, in the language of their typical speech and composed out of a genuine love of these people.