Comparing The Interconnection Of Poetry And Music In The Weary Blues

Blues is one of the most captivating genres of music. The genre was originated in the late 1800’s as a method used by African American slaves to express the circumstances as well as to put emphasis on their feelings and emotions. In order to create these feelings in this music, blues artists incorporate many of the same techniques used to write poetry. One of the most easily identifiable songs in which it is easy to see the relation between poetic elements and blues music is the song “Empty Bed Blues” by Bessie Smith.

The poem is written in free verse, offers no type of rhyme scheme, and in one long stanza. This contributes to

One of Hughes most famous poems, “Harlem(Dream Deferred)” had a great impact by posing lots of questioning. According to critic Tom Hanson, this poem is just that simple because it gives a bunch of undesirable answers to the same question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” Hanson also says how this poem refers almost completely to an unsolved problem (Hanson, Harlem). The poem gives four rather unpleasant interrogatives and one declarative answer followed by the sixth possibility, “Or does it explode?” which is supposed to be a question to make a reader really think. There are several ways to interpret the meaning of the final line, and the most sensible explanation is, the African American community is “deferring dreams” and in doing so their dreams explode in terms of the chance to act is gone. Some may say Hughes presented an unattractive view

The poem “Blues” by bpNichol is one that pushes against literary tropes and forms that become preciously established. The poem is one that pushes against these forms due to the center positioning that is untraditional. In addition analyzing a part of the poem that pushes against is the spacing between the letters, this can leave the reader speculating how to read and pronounce the poem. Another aspect to consider is the concern of reading from left to right, where as this poem pushes against this due to the typographical and acrostic arrangement. This poem also pushes against the pronunciation of the letters and words, specifically the l, o and e become isolated. Furthermore, the meaning of the words and letters become pushed against the form

Hughes was a great writer with much diversity in his types of writings. His poetry was a way for us to see a picture of urban life during the Harlem Renaissance, the habits, attitudes, and feelings of his oppressed people. These poems did more than reveal the pain of poverty, it also illustrated racial pride and dignity. “His main concern was the uplift of his people, whose strengths, resiliency, courage, and humor he wanted to record as part of the general American experience” (Wikipedia, Langston Hughes). Hughes was not ashamed of his heritage and his main theme, “black is beautiful,” was expressed and shared to the world through his poetry. During the literary movement, music was central to the cultural movement of the Harlem Renaissance, which was a main feature of Hughes’s poetry. He had an important technical influence by his emphasis on folk, jazz, and blues rhythms as the basis of his poetry of racial pride. Hughes used this unique style of writing because it was important to him to have the readers feel and experience what they were reading, “to recognize the covert rhetoric in lyric means to appreciate the overlap between emotive and discursive poetry. Rooted in song, the lyric reestablishes the ritual of human communion” (Miller 52).

In the first stanza, it is written that “ The night is beautiful (1)… So the faces of my people (2)…”, as can be seen, he compares the beauty of the night to the beauty of the faces of his people. Night is dark. When the night comes, then the blackness rises, but do not forget that it is also in the night when we can witness many incredible things like fireflies or even the shooting stars. This is how Hughes wants us to portray the image of “his people”, they are black-skinned, but they still have their own beauty within themselves, which you can see through their faces. Hughes is trying to say that those two things, “night” and “my people” are dark but they both are

My background as a tenacious student and a minority has allowed me to connect to the poem in ways that I could very much relate to. I have personally lived through the motions of life that he refers to in “Theme for English b”.Langston Hughes’s poem is more about the differences he knows other people see in him or rather on him, and what they are missing. By doing this, Hughes make it clear that the color of his skin plays a crucial role in the way that people think he is like. He finishes by boldly stating what he had been

Hughes's poem builds on top of Whitman’s poem in more ways than one. Every single person with their described job in Whitman’s poem was said to have been sung loud and strong as to what they were doing when working, meaning that they took pride in how they worked and what kind of work they did. With how there's so many types of people and jobs being talked about in Whitman’s poem, you would think it would include the lives of blacks and how they have dealt with all the racism and stuff at the time (later on too). Hughes’s poem is a type of add-on to Whitman’s poem in the way of including the whole of black people into the mix, with many lines in the poem stating things of which overall say that even if you’re black you should still be allowed to partake in things and be in an area without any prejudice towards your skin color.

The Weary Blues, written by Langston Hughes and published in 1926, won Hughes his first poetry prize. Hughes is a well-known African American poet who often wrote about the struggles for African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance, he uses figurative language in the poem to describe loneliness and despair, and the relationship between the speaker and performer, in order to make the reader better understand the blues.

The poem “The Weary Blues,” by Langston Hughes, focuses on all but the following elements of modernism:

In Harlem you heard someone playing some type of jazz, telling their story, sharing their emotions. The first poem “The Weary Blues” in stanza one it says “Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play.” The word syncopated means a displacement of beats or accents in music or a rhythm so that strong beats become weak and vice versa. It also tells a story from a black mans soul as stated in stanza 15. The next poem called Harlem says in stanza 10 “We remember”.

However, like other modernist poets, Hughes’ nominally wrote in blank verse. Many of his poems in the book utilized little rhyme schemes or recognizable meter. Still, many of these poems seem to have an internal rhythm. In illustration, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”

     Jazz music is often associated with long, lazy melodies and ornate rhythmical patterns. The Blues, a type of jazz, also follows this similar style. Langston Hughes' poem, "The Weary Blues," is no exception. The sound qualities that make up Hughes' work are intricate, yet quite apparent. Hughes' use of consonance, assonance, onomatopoeia, and rhyme in "The Weary Blues" gives the poem a deep feeling of sorrow while, at the same time, allows the reader to feel as if he or she is actually listening to the blues sung by the poem's character.

No black person can escape the blues, because the blues are an inherent part of the black existence in America. To be black is to be blue. The blues tell us about black people’s attempt to carve out a significant existence in a very trying situation. The purpose of the blues is to give structure to black existence in a context where color means rejection and humiliation. Suffering and its relation to blackness is inseparable from the meaning of the blues. Without pain and suffering, and what that meant for black people in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas, there would have been no blues. The blue mood means sorrow, frustration, despair, and black people’s attempt to take these existential realities upon themselves and not lose their sanity. The blues are not art for art’s sake, music for music’s sake. They are a way of life, a life-style of the black community; and the will for survival. Thus to seek to understand the blues apart from the suffering that created them is to misinterpret them and distort the very creativity that defines them (Cone, 1980).

The blues singer in “Ma Rainey” has an almost mystical quality to her as she manages to soothe everyone for “miles aroun’”(Brown, Stanza I, line 4) with her songs. Hughes mentions the richness jazz and blues add to lower-class black culture, and how the middle and upper class black Americans tend to turn away from blues as a signifier of the race they wish to leave behind. Brown celebrates blues as a way of connecting people, and of giving them something to hold onto as they battle the hardships associated with not being white in America. While those who wish to be white spurn blues music as “too black,” Brown proves in his poem that blues is an essential way of bringing people together. He paints a picture of its immense impact when he describes the listeners crying together as Ma Rainey sings.