The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes Page A

one poem simply: “!” He used this jazz aesthetic—one radical and racy and racial—to describe everything from a “Troubled Woman” to a “Danse Africaine.” Sometimes this asymmetrical aesthetic is refined and refracted in short poems like “Winter Moon,” quoted in full:
    How thin and sharp is the moon tonight!
    How thin and sharp and ghostly white
    Is the slim curved crook of the moon tonight!
    Or take the enigmatic testimony of “Suicide’s Note”:
    The calm,
    Cool face of the river
    Asked me for a kiss.
    From similar so-called American haiku Hughes would later craft his mid-career and mid-century masterpiece,
Montage of a Dream Deferred
(1951), which would give us quite a different Harlem in transition after the war, bringing bebop artistry to the page. In
The Weary Blues
he would first perfect that mix of hope with heartbreak—though individual poems may provide one or the other, as in his later book-length epic, they add up to a whole that truly sings.
    Death is never far in this book, including in the title poem, which after a “Proem” (or prologue-poem) sets the scene, we find ourselves “Down on Lenox Avenue the other night” where the speaker watches a blues singer perform. The poem quotes the bluesman’s song:
    “I got the Weary Blues
    And I can’t be satisfied.
    Got the Weary Blues
    And can’t be satisfied
—
    I ain’t happy no mo’
    And I wish that I had died.”
    The poem ends with a description of the singer who “slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.” Though in the end he’s begun to identify with the singer, the “I” in the poem is still only an observer—but what an observer!—rather than the blues people that Hughes would regularly go on to speak as, and even for. This isn’t to say that
The Weary Blues
isn’t filled with personae (such as “When Sue Wears Red”) or with nude dancers, beggar boys, cabaret singers, young sailors, and everyday folk who would dominate Hughes’s further work. But it’s the poems thatspeak of being “Black like me”—
black
still being fighting words in some quarters—that prove especially moving. Hughes manages remarkably to take Whitman’s American “I” and write himself into it. After labeling the final section “Our Land,” the volume ends with one of the more memorable lines of the century, almost an anthem: “I, too, am America.”
    Offering up a series of “Dream Variations,” as one section is called, Hughes, it becomes clear, is celebrating, critiquing, and completing the American dream, that desire for equality or at least opportunity. But his America takes in the Americas—including Mexico, where his estranged father moved to flee the color line of the United States—and even the West Coast of Africa, which he’d also visited. His well-paced poetry is laced with an impeccable exile.
The Weary Blues
has so many now-classic verses that exemplify this it is hard to single out just one. But certainly we must mention “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which, like the book’s proem, manages to recast the “I” as racial and universal, declaring, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” The first mature poem Hughes wrote (in 1920), here “Rivers” is dedicated to Du Bois; it is the poem he would end every reading with. Could it speak of the same river that had asked the suicide for a kiss? However mighty, this river, both real and metaphoric, flowed across and united a nation that, even if it didn’t keep all its promises, still managed to hold out promise.
    Writer Carl Van Vechten had helped guide Hughes’s poems to Knopf, which would become his longtime publisher. But just as he would capitalize on seeing the popular poet Vachel Lindsay in a restaurant he worked in—playing up his being a newly “discovered” busboy poet, even though
The Weary Blues
was already in production—it was Hughes alone who made the most of such opportunities. Van Vechten and Hughes would remain close to the end of