Langston Hughes 'Poem Life Is Fine'

     People always listen to music, watch movies or plays, and even read poetry without once even thinking what is could be that helps and artist eventually create a masterpiece. Often times, it is assumed that artists just have a “gift”, and people just do not consider the circumstances and situations that gradually mold a dormant idea into a polished reality. This seems to be the case with nearly every famous actor, writer, painter, or musician; including the ever-famous Langston Hughes.

life is fine!" Everyone's life is different because some have it better than others. It's easy to know that he doesn't actually mean his life is fine by giving us clues in the rest of the poem. Hughes also uses imagery to help us picture his situation. He says "I sat down on the bank.

A huddle of horns And a tinkle of glass A note Handed down from Marcus to Malcolm To a brother Too bad and too cool to give his name. Sometimes despair Makes the stoops shudder Sometimes there are endless depths of pain Singing a capella on street corners

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902, to James Nathaniel Hughes, a lawyer and businessman, and Carrie Mercer (Langston) Hughes, a teacher. The couple separated shortly thereafter. James Hughes was, by his son’s account, a cold man who hated blacks (and hated himself for being one), feeling that most of them deserved their ill fortune because of what he considered their ignorance and laziness. Langston’s youthful visits to him there, although sometimes for extended periods, were strained and painful. He attended Columbia University in 1921-22, and when he died he, left everything to three elderly women who had cared for him in his last illness,

Life is Fine is a poem by Langston Hughes. The form of the poem is rhyming couplets. This poems is about him having suicidal thoughts but not actually doing them. The main idea of this poem is that anyone can say their life is fine but in reality their life really isn't fine.

James Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was very small, and his father (who found American racism made his desires to be a lawyer impossible) left the family and emigrated to Mexico. Hughes' mother moved with her child to Lawrence, Kansas, so she and he could live with his grandmother, Mary Langston.

Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. He was named after his father, James Hughes, but was known as Langston. He was the only child from his parents James and Carrie Hughes. His parents were not married for long because of an unhappy marriage. When they separated, Langston was left with his mother, who left him behind to move from city to city to find work. Langston ended up living with his 70 year-old grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. He lived with her until he was 13, and then he moved back with his mother in Lincoln, Kansas after his grandmother died in 1915.

At the moment Langston Hughes was inspired to write this poem, he was looking out the window in the train in which he was travelling. On his trip, the train was going across the Mississippi River during sunset he witnessed the magnificence and beauty of nature. This was enough to remind him of hope and all things positive, along with the motivation he needed to compose the poem. I believe the author repeated the use of the word river because it is symbolic. Rivers continue on the path they go; they never stop flowing forward regardless of the circumstances. That is what Langston Hughes wanted the audience to know, and himself as well. Everyone can look forward to a brighter tomorrow even if there is something that holds them back. When everything seems like it is all lost, the only last resort we have is hope. That is the key theme of the entire poem, hope is strength and that

Hawthorne presents two apparent visages for Dimmesdale in “The Scarlet Letter”. In addition to the externally good, yet silently deceitful reverend, further analysis illustrates that Dimmesdale possesses three different personalities. In the city, Dimmesdale is perceived as a “Godly master” (55). A man who abides by his moral and religious obligations. In his interactions with Hester and Pearl, he is a coward. These actions derive from his jealousy of Hester Prynne, fear of repercussions, and the slandering of his name. With Chillingworth, he is a blind host. Dimmesdale is tormented physically and mentally until all that is left of him is the sin itself.

“The Harlem Renaissance was a time where the Afro-American came of age; he became self-assertive and racially conscious… he proclaimed himself to be a man and deserving respect. Those Afro-Americans who were part of that time period saw themselves as principals in that moment of transformation from old to new” (Huggins 3). African Americans migrated to the North in great numbers to seek better lives than in the South as the northern economy was booming and industrial jobs were numerous. This movement brought new ideas and talents that shifted the culture forever. Black writers, such as Langston Hughes, used their work to claim a place for themselves and to demand self-respect in society. Poems that Langston Hughes wrote captured the essence of the complexity of a life that mixes joy and frustration of black American life through the incorporation of jazz and blues in order to examine the paradox of being black in mostly white America, the land of the not quite free.

Langston Hughes was one of the first black men to express the spirit of blues and jazz

Written in 1902 Life is fine is one of the best poems by Langston Hughes. Life is Fine features the cycle of life and how important life is. Life is fine uses such as tone, figurative languages and other devices to get the message across. Langston Hughes structures the poem as a prologue where the narrator narrates his progress from being in total despair to self –realization about how important life is. The poem contains six stanzas, and the first four stanzas are the interpretations of the narrator’s attempts to commit suicide. The narrator’s solid feeling about his situation is getting worse and he’s struggling with it, and he makes another effort to kill himself by leaping from a sixteenth floor of a building in the third stanza. This is also when the reader or the audience comes to recognize the reason he is trying to kill himself. The theme of this poem denotes to the disillusion that people usually have of dying. When there are somethings enormously hard and unhappy, it may

As time has passed humanity still tends to separate each other based on our racial being rather than seeing each other as one human race. Langston Hughes’s, “A New Song,” published in 1938 introduces the idea of a new vision of social relations in American society. Hughes’s original version of this poem written in 1933, does not encompass his growing anger on this subject that is dwelled upon in his published version. However, with Hughes’s powerful tone and word choice throughout his 1938 rendition, his reader is able to understand his urge to transform America into an interracial culture. (Central Idea) His poem voices the importance of transforming society into a multiethnic unity and working-class established through cultural ties between whites and blacks. (Thesis) Hughes voices this crucial need to change through his emphasis on African American’s past struggles as opposed to the new dream, his militant tone, and through expressing the role that the establishment of cultural ties plays in society.

Poetry is a complicated yet beautiful artform. It allows for an individual to express their emotions and ideas by painting a picture using eloquent lines. Although alluring, poetry is also perplexing. It is almost impossible to fully understand what the author was exactly trying to get across in writing. There are however, multiple factors that can be used to help analyze poetry to get a better feel of that certain piece. In this paper, I will be analyzing Life Is Fine by Langston Hughes using irony, symbols, tone, rhyme, rhythm and meter.

Life is Fine, by Langston Hughes, is a six stanza poem with a rhyming pattern of ABCB. Langston is discussing his attempts at suicide, and his regrets towards them. The poem’s message is that, while you may “holler” and maybe even “cry”, you should not give up, because life is something worth living. Langston uses an extended metaphor to show how he felt after trying to commit suicide twice: “Though you may hear me holler, And you may see me cry- I’ll be dogged sweat baby, If you gonna see me die”. This extended metaphor can be interpreted to mean that he doesn’t want to die anymore, and that it would take a lot more pain, whether it is physical, mental, or emotional pain.