I’ve known rivers:
\nI’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human
\nblood in human veins.<\/p>\nMy soul has grown deep like the rivers.<\/p>\n
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
\nI built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
\nI looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
\nI heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New
\nOrleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.<\/p>\n
I’ve known rivers:
\nAncient, dusky rivers.<\/p>\n
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.<\/em><\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 […]","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[155,89],"class_list":["post-249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-langston-hughes","tag-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}