Essay on Langston Hughes' The Weary Blues

This is evident in the titles of the works, “the sun rising” provoking thoughts of new beginnings and excitement. “rising” suggests an uplifting aura, though this is hampered by the speaker immediately calling the sun a “busy old fool” in opening. Combined these factors suggest youthful arrogance. The title “Funeral Blues” is even more indicative, setting the sombre tone of the work due to the death of a loved one. The structuring of the poems contributes also, with Funeral Blues having a regular AABB pattern, making lines feel uniform and serious. It suggests that while the speaker has lost so much he clings to structure and order. In comparison to this, The Sun Rising follows a less consistent rhyming scheme, with some lines rhyming with the one after, and some alternating. This creates a looser, less serious feel, reflecting the emotions of the poem. Lines are placed irregularly, some indenting further than others, giving the poem its playful feel as they run irregularly down the page. Structural aspects play an important role in the creation of tone within the

Because the speaker is direct and clear, we are able to recognize the nostalgic tone simply because of what the speaker is explicitly telling us. However, the structure of the poem also contributes to the tone. There are no punctuations throughout the entire poem, yet we still read it slow enough to create a dramatic and sad mood. The poem is divided into fourteen couplets, each with a substantial gap between them. At the end of a couplet, we are forced to slow down and fully pause before moving on to a new section. In addition, most of the lines are complete clauses

In the first stanza "sunset stripes.... navy blue", with the opening line of the poem, the first thing that came into reader's mind was a sunset with the vibrant colors. The description of color helps the reader to see what the narrator is seeing. The colors are extremely lush and vibrant which explains the narrator's mindset. The overall tone

In 1925 Hughes poem “The Weary Blues” won first prize in the opportunity magazine, receiving scholarships. Carl Van Vechten like his work

The poem uses the use of sound from the very start. With the words “dreams deferred”, and “Does it dry up?” In addition to that it also uses the words “syrupy sweet.” This poem uses Rhyme with the words sun and run likewise with meat and sweet and with load and explode. The symbolism is communicated through similes "dry up like a raisin in the sun," and, "stink like rotten meat." To talk about meter, the poem is a rundown of inquiries and the first stanza alongside the last one are comprised of one line and the second stanza is seven and the third is just two. The syllables in every line appear to be conflicting with one another a few lines having seven syllables and others running from three to

What do you notice about how the poem is structured? How does it affect how you read the poem? You don’t stop at the end of each line, you just continue through the lines because they don’t rhyme.

Poetry is defined as a literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm. The genre of poetry extends to many different forms of art today, such as rap, country, or even rock music. With this in mind, The Weary Blues is undoutably poetry, and all jazz poetry should be considered as so. With lines like “The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.”, The Weary Blues conveys very strong emotions to the reader. Thus sealing it’s spot in being called

The use of consonance provides added depth and texture to the words. The second stanza talks about how grief can cause silence. Techniques used in the second stanza are, rhyme and imagery. The effect of rhyme is simple as just to set the tone in the poem. The third stanza talks about how grief is so bad that you cannot pick yourself up and move.

The repeated sounds of word interior consonants, or consonance, also plays a role in adding to the verbal flow of the poem with the sounds of the words “all, fills, alabaster, wool, wrinkles, and stump, stack, stem, and wrists, posts, ghosts” More of the beautiful imagery of the poem is obvious when it is paraphrased and also reveals the emotional theme of the peace and tranquility that is experienced in the leaden silence of a heavy snowfall. This is the poem paraphrased-Snow falls silently from dark and heavy clouds and sprinkles the forest and roads that are blanketed in white, it fills in and equals out the mountains and the valleys in a continuous blanket covering fences in a heavenly sheet, all the remains of the summer’s harvest in the fields with covered with snow and showing not a clue, beautifully highlighting the remaining exposed features, then vanishing in a vapor, leaving no traces of their presence. It instantly reminds anybody that has ever experienced a winter storm of this beauty in nature, and of the peace and beauty in the purity of the clean snow. Dickinson also makes the reader subliminally realize the perceptual pleasure and heightened imagery of the scene by associating the scenes with other things normally associated with beauty such as the application of powders and makeup to a person’s face, celestial veils, and the ruffled ankles of a Queen.

This poem is entitled “The Weary Blues” and is written by Langston Hughes. It was originally published in 1926 in the Urban League Magazine. The time period in which this poem was written consisted of a lot of slavery of dark-skinned people. Moreover, the collection that this poem is extracted from, also entitled “The Weary Blues”, focuses on the struggles and experiences of African Americans at that time. It was during the time period of these struggles when the Africans brought the blues, originally originated from the Africans, to America. The arrival of this genre of music into America explains the situation that is dealt with in this poem, which is a Negro man singing and playing the blues to himself. Hughes’ use of poetic devices in this

(line 1) and ?light? (line 3) through sound instill an idea of chaos in the reader?s mind, how can light be present in something associated with dark such as night? There are also few cases of words that appear to rhyme due to similar letter arrangements. The meter is in chaos as the number of feet per line increases to a point then decreases and increases again throughout the stanza. Since the first stanza is the largest this process occurs more often in the first stanza than in any other. The meter also reminds the reader of the chaotic waves that will tamper with any tranquil beach scene. The beach is not a place the speaker can go to relax and enjoy his life with his loved one. Visually it appears to be such a place, but as he calls the reader and his loved one to the window we hear the sense of chaos he hears on the beach.

     The second stanza has mainly quiet sounds. With words such as oft, store, swath,  seeks, careless, soft-lifted, and drowsed, the whole stanza is filled with soft s and w sounds.  This makes the stanza very sleepy and slow but with a warm comfortable feeling.  What is most brilliant is that he writes about sleep and then uses words that sound like sleep to describe it.  That makes the reader really experience how he is explaining death with sounds, not just words.  This change from stanza one also goes along with the progression of life.  It started out loud and young, and now has begun to soften, such as life does when one grows older or nears death.

Even though it uses free-verse structure, the poem by no means lacks musical quality. The rhythm of the poem is noticeably slow-paced owing to the use of long sentences broken with enjambments. For instance, the entire poem is made up of 8 sentences: the shortest being “She wears my face Superimposed” in the third stanza. This effect of breaking the stanzas allows the reader to gain deeper understanding of the father’s poignant feeling. The use of alliteration and consonance can be found throughout the poem. The letters “g” and “f” are repeatedly deployed as in “finishing, family, figure, fall, face, forever, flicker, faces, gluing, googly, glass, grown, and glint”. The repeated sounds of the letters resemble the grieving and melancholic feeling the father is suffering. Lastly, the use of consonance adds colour to the musical quality of the poem. The last stanza of the poem consists of words ending with the letter “t” as in “against, glint, slant, and light”, creating the effect of requiring the reader to pay close attention to the father’s expressive voice and feeling about his

The rhythm scheme in this poem follows a consistent ABAB pattern throughout the entirety of the poem. The first stanza above shows that the rhyme scheme is ABABA, because line 1, 3, and 5 rhyme together. Whereas, line 2 and 4 are rhyming. The meter is also shown within that first stanza. The tension is on the word walks, beau-ty, like, and night in the first line. This pattern is consistent throughout the poem. The meter stays the same until you approach line 4, and that is where it changes. “Meets” makes the meter change within this line. Often when the meter changes within a poem it is because the speaker wants you to pay attention, and take careful stock of what they’re saying. The speaker wants you to see that things have changed throughout the poem. The once easy flowing and uniform poem has changed slightly. Sometimes though, the author or speaker just needs to change things up because they could not