18 pages • 36 minutes read
Langston HughesA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The rivers in this poem symbolize two things. First, they symbolize the lineage with which Hughes identifies as a Black man. He introduces this symbol by comparing the rivers to ancient blood in veins. Blood is generational, and the rivers serve as the cultural blood that is passed down. Even though Hughes cannot trace, with any exactitude, his bloodline to the people who lived along the Euphrates, Nile, or Congo, he is connected to those people and to their great accomplishments. This is important for a man whose society views him as subhuman and seeks to isolate him and rob his soul of hope. By connecting himself with the great river of humanity that came before him, he can draw from the collective strength of his forebears.
The rivers’ second meaning is renewal. Rivers are life-giving. Human beings emerged from the water, and water feeds the agricultural cycle, bringing life to crops and thus to people and civilizations. Water also brings renewed life symbolically in the religious context of baptism, a tradition in which people are spiritually renewed and born again under the flow of water. Hughes reinforces this idea of renewal through the actions he describes being performed with the rivers: The speaker bathes in one, sleeps by one, builds by one.
By Langston Hughes
Children’s Rhymes
Langston Hughes
Cora Unashamed
Langston Hughes
Dreams
Langston Hughes
Harlem
Langston Hughes
I look at the world
Langston Hughes
I, Too
Langston Hughes
Let America Be America Again
Langston Hughes
Me and the Mule
Langston Hughes
Mother to Son
Langston Hughes
Mulatto
Langston Hughes
Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston
Not Without Laughter
Langston Hughes
Slave on the Block
Langston Hughes
Thank You, M'am
Langston Hughes
The Big Sea
Langston Hughes
Theme for English B
Langston Hughes
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
Langston Hughes
The Ways of White Folks
Langston Hughes
The Weary Blues
Langston Hughes
Tired
Langston Hughes