“The Weary Blues”

Groundbreaking Poem

Introduction

The poem, “The Weary Blues” was written in 1926, during the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes wrote this poem to represent the beauty and affliction of African American artists at the time. This essay will focus on the significance of the poem “The Weary Blues”, by discussing the poem’s main theme of oppression and creativity.

About The Author

Langston Hughes was an American writer, who was born on February 1st, 1902, in New York. However, there is some evidence that shows that he may have been born in 1901. Soon after he was born his parents separated, his father moved to Mexico and he was raised by his grandmother, while his mother worked. When Hughes was 12 years old, his grandmother passed, and he and his mother moved away. They relocated quite a lot before landing in Clevland. In Hughes’ autobiography he wrote “I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas,” After graduating high school, in 1921 he traveled to Mexico and wrote the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. It was then published in The Crisis magazine, which sparked the start of his career. He then attended Columbia University, in New York, where he explored Harlem. It was there where Hughes formed an attachment to the “great dark city”. Most of Hughes’s work was inspired by the Harlem Renaissance Movement, where he admired the art created despite oppression. In 1925, Hughes won an Opportunity magazine poetry prize. According to Britannica “That same year, Van Vechten introduced Hughes’s poetry to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, who accepted the collection that Knopf would publish as The Weary Blues in 1926.”

About The Book

Langston Hughes starts the poem, ‘The Weary Blues’, by describing a musician playing the blues on a piano. He vividly describes the scenery and every movement the musician makes. “Down on Lenox Avenue the other night — By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway. . . .” (Hughes, lines 4–6). Describing the musician’s lazy swaying alludes to the musician being exhausted. The musician is channeling their exhaustion and sorrow into their music by singing “Ain’t got nobody in all this world, Ain’t got nobody but ma self. I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’ And put ma troubles on the shelf” (Hughes, lines 19–22). The musician is tired of the enduring pain from mistreatment and the rejection of society. Hughes’s use of the word “sways” gives motion to the poem, describing how one would move at the sound of the blues. The structure of the poem is intended to resemble a blues song because of its flow and its use of written and spoken English.

Legacy

“The Weary Blues” brought to light the social issues of the 1920’s. Hughes, while writing this poem, had the African American community in mind. Hughes expresses the hardships the African American community was going through and how they made something beautiful out of the situation. He describes music as an escape from reality, that the African American community would often use. This expression of emotion through music is what drew the speaker of the poem in. According to LitCharts “For the speaker, this music is a kind of relief: the speaker finds it soothing, even healing, to hear such sorrow transformed into song.” Through music, the musician in the poem expressed his pain and sorrows freely and was heard. Despite the struggles the African American community and its artists were facing, they found comfort in their art. Regardless of how society looked down on them and mistreated them, they found beauty in their pain and suffering. However, boldly expressing themselves does come with a price. At the end of the day, after they have expressed themselves, it is draining. After the musician in the poem goes home “He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead” (Hughes, line 35). Deeply expressing his sorrows is so painful that it is sucking the life out of him. “The Weary Blues” celebrates the blues as a means of expression but also recognizes the cost and the toll it takes on the artists.

Works Cited

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Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea an Autobiography. 1940. Paw Prints, 2008. Accessed June 14, 2024.

Hughes, Langston. “The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 2002, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47347/the-weary-blues Accessed June 14, 2024.

“LitCharts.” LitCharts, www.litcharts.com/poetry/langston-hughes/the-weary-blues. Accessed June 14, 2024.

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Langston Hughes | Biography & Facts.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 15 Aug. 2018, www.britannica.com/biography/Langston-Hughes. Accessed June 14, 2024.