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The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921)

BY LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967)

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.

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Summary

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is written in free verse (i.e., without rhyme) and is divided into
five parts, or stanzas.

Stanza 1

The first stanza consists of two sentences joined by a colon, each starting with the words "I've
known rivers." The colon indicates that the speaker will explain or define what he means by
the initial statement in the lines to follow. The first thing he means, as literally stated in the
second sentence, is that he has known very old rivers.

The speaker repeats the opening three words in a refrain (a grouping of words repeated for
emphasis): "I've known rivers." The technique, also called anaphora, emphasizes the thought
that some of the rivers the speaker has known are as old as the physical world and thus have
occurred before the birth of humankind.

Stanza 2

The second stanza is a single line in which the speaker reports that his soul has grown deep
like rivers. The simile, with its use of like, compares the soul's growth to the process of the
development of a river over time. The rivers carve their depth and acquire their shape over
millennia, a natural process that is gradual and often violent. The same, then, can be said for
the speaker (and the black people he represents). The course of human history has produced
the depth of his soul. It goes back to the very beginning of life.

Stanza 3

The third stanza consists of three end-stopped sentences (that is, the ends of the sentences fall
at the end of the lines) and a fourth sentence that occupies three lines (that is, these lines are
enjambed so that the poetic line and the grammatical line do not coincide). Each sentence
names a major river and indicates the life stage of the speaker who has been present in each
case, marking a domestic or historical moment on the banks. The poem moves from the
Euphrates in the Middle East to the Congo in Africa and on to the Nile in Egypt. The longer
final sentence locates the speaker in the New World and the Mississippi River, invoking
Abraham Lincoln and a sunset that turns the muddy river to gold.

Stanza 4

The fourth stanza consists of the organizing refrain, "I've known rivers," joined by a colon to
the short, descriptive phrase, "Ancient, dusky rivers." The stanza's first sentence repeats the
opening, "I've known rivers." The second describes them as "ancient," a word repeated from
the second sentence of the opening stanza, and "dusky," a word that reiterates the description
of the "muddy" bosom of the Mississippi in the previous stanza. The presence of the colon
and its location after the repeated phrase "I've known rivers," encourages the reader to
consider that "dusky" in this position refers back to the "flow of human blood" similarly
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situated in the first stanza. Also, the "singing" of the Mississippi is an example of
personification—a human attribute assigned to an inanimate form.

Stanza 5

The fifth and final stanza, a single line, is a repetition of the single line of the second stanza:
"My soul has grown deep like the rivers." In the repetition, there is an affirmation that the
important idea here is not just the depth of the river but the growth of the soul, a matter of
human history as well as natural history.

Analysis

Composition and Background

The literary critic Arnold Rampersad reports that Langston Hughes scribbled the poem on the
back of an envelope in 1920, on a train crossing the Mississippi at St. Louis. Hughes was on
his way south to visit his father in Mexico. The sunset on the river and perhaps his complex
relationship with his father and his own racially mixed identity inspired his reflection on the
origins of the Negro. This moment of openness and vulnerability produced a poem of great
strength. Hughes's lifelong project, as expressed in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," begins
with the certainty that there is no difference among human beings based on differences in
skin color—blacks have the same depth of soul and connection to history as all other humans.
His life's work was to disseminate that truth. Hughes dedicated "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
to W.E.B. Du Bois, a fellow black writer and leader of the Harlem Renaissance. A political
activist and scholar, Du Bois, who was the first African American to earn a PhD from
Harvard University, founded the NAACP and promoted education for black Americans.

Structure and Free Verse

To say that a poem is in free verse is not to say that the poem has no shape or intentional
structure. The structural symmetries of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," based on a line count
and repeated and related language at the beginning and ends of the lines, formally support the
oracular tone. Equally, the symmetries support the speaker's conviction that the history of the
Negro within the history of civilization creates an imperative for the equality of black and
white peoples.

The balanced arrangement of the stanzas creates an interesting structure. The poem consists
of five stanzas. Counting the sentences in each stanza, the pattern made is 2-1, 4, 2-1.

Woven into that pattern are the final words in the 2-1 sequences—that is, the last words
looking at the first and second stanza as one group of sentences, and the fourth and fifth
stanza as another. The closing words of each complete sentence in the first two stanzas are
"rivers," "veins," and "rivers." Then, the closing words of each sentence in the last pair of
stanzas are "rivers," "rivers," "rivers." The effect is to create a frame connecting rivers and
human blood to contain the central four sentences. These begin: "I bathed," "I built," "I
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looked," "I heard." All are basic human experiences. Thus, the poem's structure emphasizes
the way in which the story of black origins is tied to fundamental human experience.

Along with the balanced structure, the poem operates out of a key simile, "My soul has
grown deep like the rivers." The repeated image links the expansive depths of the soul of the
Negro (whose history encompasses the violence of slavery) with the depth of rivers as they
increase over time. The comparison stresses that overcoming violence or force is linked to
growth.

Place

Geography plays an important role in the "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." In the third stanza,
the speaker names rivers from all over the world. All of these rivers had slave-holding
cultures on their banks.

The Euphrates, which runs through western Asia, watered the "cradle of civilization" called
Mesopotamia (Greek, meaning "between two rivers," the Tigris and Euphrates). Between
5000 BCE and 6 CE, the Sumerians were a stratified culture, consisting of nobles,
commoners, and slaves.

The Congo, which runs through central Africa, was the site of a great kingdom. By 1484 the
Congolese were involved in trade with the Portuguese, which involved copper, ivory, and
slaves. The slave trade did not end until the late 1800s.

The Nile, which runs through northern Africa, is commonly associated with the Hebrew
slaves who raised the pyramids.

The Mississippi, which runs through the central part of the United States, is associated with
the American slave trade. This association is emphasized by the references to Abraham
Lincoln (the president whose Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in January 1863)
and "singing," a means for enslaved African Americans to assert their humanity. Lincoln
traveled to New Orleans as a youth in 1828 where he was first exposed to the degradation of
a slave marketplace.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers | Symbols

The Rivers

The rivers, as does water in general, suggest the streams of life. Moreover, the phrase "My
soul has grown deep like the rivers" is a key repetition in which the verb, "has grown," is
central. Rivers grow deep by a natural process that takes place over a very long period. That
process reflects Earth's participation in the atmosphere, a matter of wind and weather. A soul
that has weathered like the rivers is not only old and deep but has also sustained the ravages
of time. And the soul's growth—its depth—is the achievement of its suffering.
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In addition, each river mentioned has a specific symbolic function within the larger symbol.
The Euphrates, evoking the "cradle of civilization," represents the origins of humanity, while
the Congo evokes the origins of black people. The Nile represents the origins of Western
civilization; and finally, the "singing" Mississippi, in its association with Abraham Lincoln,
conjures up the hymns and suffering of the slaves as well as the celebration of emancipation.

Color

The speaker mentions color in relation to the rivers several times, in ways that resonate with
the poem's treatment of race. First, the speaker observes of the Mississippi, "I've seen its
muddy / bosom turn all golden in the sunset." "Muddy" suggests a dark brown color, which
lightens to "golden" because of the setting sun—perhaps referencing the literal mixing of
blood that results in mixed-race people such as Hughes himself. The use of both muddy and
golden to describe the river could also suggest the spectrum of African American skin tones.
Then, in the penultimate line, the speaker references "ancient, dusky rivers"—"dusky" again
suggesting a dark color, and again tying the rivers to the racial identity of the speaker.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers | Themes

Interconnectedness of All Souls

Langston Hughes believed—as contemporary research across many disciplines indicates—

that race is a social construct, all people are related, and prejudice can be eliminated with
understanding. In the first volume of his autobiography, Hughes, a multiracial man, relates an
experience in a restaurant in the South where the ambiguity of his appearance confirmed for
him the random nature of racial prejudice. He was asked by a waiter whether he was black or
Mexican, indicating that he could serve Hughes if he was Mexican but not if he was a Negro.

However, racist rhetoric up through the first half of the 20th century alleged that the Negro
was subhuman, or more of an animal. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" addresses this aspect of
racism by placing black people at the sources of civilization, places "ancient as the world"
and when "dawns were young." By placing the Negro at the source of human life, the poem
suggests that he is the first man, and with the poem's watery citations, he is the wellspring of
humanity, the father of us all.

Rivers and the Bloodstream

In lines 2 and 3 of the poem, there is an elaborate setup of the idea that the rivers the speaker
has known are older than known human life. The speaker says the rivers in the poem are
"older than the flow of human blood in human veins," and the enjambed sentence repeats the
word human, associating it with both flow and blood. In the lines to follow, the repetition
introduces the notion of the world's great rivers streaming together in the deep soul of the
Negro. In a figurative sense, human souls are interconnected by a network of veins just as the
natural world is by a network of rivers.

The concept was not new. A section of Ralph Waldo Emerson's great 1841 essay, "The Over-
Soul," an investigation of human intuition, opens with the notion that life is "mean," or small.
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In a section dedicated to the interconnectedness of all souls and their grandest productions—
books, friendship, humanity, love—Emerson observes that communion is inevitable "because
the heart of one is the heart of all ... one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation
through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and truly seen, its tide is one."

It is entirely likely that Emerson would have shown up in the early-century education of the
young Langston Hughes. Regardless, the interconnectedness of images in these two works
demonstrates the powerful organizing notion of the poem: the blood of one is the blood of all.

Nature of Black Speech

In his groundbreaking essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), Hughes
declared, "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-
skinned selves without fear or shame. ... We know we are beautiful. And ugly too." When the
rivers in the poem turn colorful shades—"dusky," "golden," "muddy"—the changes suggest
the various skin tones of people of color as well as the judgments associated with skin color
variations. That is, "dusky" and "golden" are positive, while "muddy" stands in contrast.
There was also a well-known preference among slaveholders for slaves with lighter
complexions, a preference that filtered into the general population. According to the literary
critic William Cook, Hughes argues for an art focusing on all "the low-down folk, the
common people."

True to his argument, Hughes wrote in many voices, all part of black life in America. "The
Negro Speaks of Rivers" takes its tone and the ring of its repetitions from Negro spirituals,
and its meter from the breath units of free verse that emulate black speech.