Poetry is harder work than prose. Certainly its harder to write, but it takes more out of the reader too, being distilled and concentrated with meaning in a way that most prose is not. For example, I’m currently working my way through Shakespeare’s Sonnets at a rate of only five or six per evening. Even that slow pace probably allows for plenty of misunderstanding and missing the point, but the unwillingness of peotry to yield up its meaning immediately is a vital part of its nature.
All of this is by way of an excuse for the fact that I’m not usually in sufficiently rigorous mood of a Monday to choose and comment on a poem. So perhaps we’ll move things along to Tuesday, when the week has been more energetically entered into.
Langston Hughes was a leading member of the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of Black American culture in the 1920’s which numbered Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong amongst it’s more famous contributors. Hughes was not unlike Ellington, an urban nothern sophisticate who yet retained a deep cultural affinity with the Old South. It is this voice, cosmopolitan and urbane, but still brimming with awarenes of its past that we hear in “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.
Hughes’ voice here is not his alone. He speaks of and for his people and their entire history. There’s a vast, weary past behind his opening incantation “I’ve known rivers”. He, and his people have always known rivers, from the ancient biblical past to the then recent days of Slavery and Civil War. Rivers are compared to veins carrying life-blood, and a line or two later, we are by the Congo in Africa, the heart that will send Hughes out through history and geography. Slavery is directly alluded to in the reference to the Nile and the Pyramids, as well as in the more obvious refence to the Mississippi later in the poem. This allusion to Egypt is multifaceted: “I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it” rings with pride in historical achievement, even as it acknowledges the reality of slavery. This is a poetic reference too though, it refers to a distinctive trope in Black American Christianity, the identification with the Egyptian captivity that fed into the musical tradition of “Go, Down Moses”. This musical theme is further stressed in the reference to the “Singing Mississippi”, recalling slave chants, even as it celebrates the arrival of the Emancipator, Lincoln. Returning to the opening theme, “I’ve known rivers”, Hughes strengthens the sense of an age-old voice, wearily repeating a mantra, but also adds to the musicality of the poem’s structure: “I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers” sways like a bluesy musical refrain, adding yet another layer of history and tradition to this powerful, multilayered poem.
7 Comments
Lovely choice, as soulful and sonorous as the stately Congo itself.
Its humanity is a nice slap in the face for racists everywhere too.
Hughes came to my attention a couple of years ago when the John Kerry campaign adopted “Let America Be America”, title of another of his works, as a slogan. Predictably, the wing-nut right went to town on the fact that Hughes was, for a time, something of a Stalinist. All of which goes to show that poets are not the ideal people to go to for political guidance and that political zealots, conversely, know jack about art.
Indeed, it’s completely baffling how someone whose people’s civil rights were being systematically trampled and who were considered a lower order of humanity could possibly attracted to communistic ideas of the international brotherhood of labour and what have you.
Nice to see the tolerance lives on.
This excellent choice of poem meanders beautifully through a centuries-long panorama of African-American history.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but well crafted words can carry countless images with them.
Nice choice Fergal.
[…] I alluded, in a comment on my post below on Langston Hughes, to the minor political row which was prompted by John Kerry quoting him a few times in his speeches. Hughes was a commie for a while, you see, so John Kerry must be one too (though to follow this logic any further, one would have to conclude that Kerry is also a dead black poet). The more temperate criticism, though still utterly wrong-headed insofar as it applied to Kerry, focussed on the fact that erstwhile Stalinists and Maoists are far more easily rehabilitated than former fascists. Now I’m willing to give Hughes a pass on this. Given that he was a black man in Depression America, when he looked around and saw that only the Communist Party was prepared to make a no-apologies, no-reservations stand for him, why wouldn’t he have signed on? And if they told him that all was well in Mother Russia, that the Show Trials were no such thing, well, they seemed by their actions to be decent folk, so like many others, he believed them, for a time. But what about those who came later, when the information was there, if they chose to read it, that Russia was a prison state? It’s easy from a distance to dismiss liberties like freedom of speech as bourgeois luxuries, but when you start hearing stories back from the gulags or re-education camps, it takes a curiously sclerotic imagination to dismiss them as Western Propaganda. When Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao biography was reviewed on the BBC’s Late Review, Rosie Boycott said it was a sobering draught, having marched in Mao’s favour in the sixties. That she was prepared to admit this at all rather amazed me, as did her lack of even embarassment, let alone shame. How many English Blackshirts of the thirties could be similarly blasé by the late 1940’s? […]
[…] Poetry, as I mentioned last week, is so filled with distilled meaning that it can be read only at a fraction of the pace of prose. Thus, Seamus Heaney’s Opened Ground, which I bought a month and a half ago, is an ongoing presence in my reading life. The advantage of reading it from start to finish, rather than dipping, is that (a) I can, when I reach the end, be sure that I’ve read all the poems, and (b) it allows me to see Heaney’s work develop over time. […]
[…] Stung by guilt, I popped into the bookshop (Hodges Figgis has the best poetry section, in my own opinion) and picked up a few volumes. On previous searches I was unable to find a Selected Poems by Langston Hughes (about whom I wrote here) so upon sighting one, I fell eagerly upon it. I remembered liking John Donne a lot in school, so I figured that a collection priced a mere €2.90 was too good an offer to refuse. Finally, Id been meaning to look into the work of Robert Lowell for some time, so this collection, bound in a classy-looking pamphlet style made up the trio. […]