Image: Emily Dickinson – Amherst College – This daguerrotype circa 1847 at age 17 is likely the only authentic, extant image of the poet.
Emily Dickinson’s “It did not surprise me”
In Emily Dickinson’s “It did not surprise me,” the speaker has created a bird metaphor as she begins to muse on the unlikely event that she may lose her intuitive ability to perceive beyond sense awareness.
Introduction with Text of “It did not surprise me”
With a similar motivational purpose of her riddle-poem “I have a Bird in spring,” Emily Dickinson’s speaker in “It did not surprise me” employs a bird metaphor to contemplate the notion that her special intuitive ability to perceive events, ideas, and entities beyond sense awareness might abandon her.
The bird metaphor remains a useful poetic device for Emily Dickinson‘s speakers as they bestow flight on their ability to create poetic dramas. Also, similar to her riddle-poem “I have a Bird in spring” in this little drama, the speaker is unveiling the metaphorical bird as a mystical muse, as the speaker ruminates on the idea that if that little birdling were to fly away from her, she would become heartbroken.
However, unlike the riddle aspect in “I have a Bird in spring,” the poet allows her speaker to report first as if she is merely describing a literal bird. The speaker then moves into a questioning format which shines a light on the possibility that her muse might just up and fly off as any real bird might do.
The speaker is obliged, however, to leave the issue without answering it, because she will keep that question as long as she continues in her mission of poetry creation. Ultimately, no creative artist can ever know in advance, if or when inspiration will vanish and possibly never return.
Despite temporary flights into the clairvoyance of certain noumena, as long as the poet remains earth bound, she remains dependent to a certain extent on ordinary sense awareness.
It did not surprise me
It did not surprise me – So I said – or thought – She will stir her pinions And the nest forgot,
Traverse broader forests – Build in gayer boughs, Breathe in Ear more modern God’s old fashioned vows –
This was but a Birdling – What and if it be One within my bosom Had departed me?
This was but a story – What and if indeed There were just such coffin In the heart instead?
Reading of “It did not surprise me”
Commentary on “It did not surprise me”
Dickinson’s speaker metaphorically likens her muse—which she knows is bound to her mystical insight—to a bird, as she contemplates the possibility of losing the blessing provided by her innate, God-given talent and mystical ability.
First Stanza: A Thought Awakening
It did not surprise me – So I said – or thought – She will stir her pinions And the nest forgot,
The speaker begins her soliloquy by admitting that her lack of “surprise” at some event has been prompted by the thought of a bird stirring and flying off from its nest. Between her opening statement and the bird’s first movement, the speaker asserts that upon realizing her lack of surprise, she spoke out but then changed her claim to the fact that she merely thought about the coming event without actually giving it voice.
The final two lines of the stanza express the possibility of an activity as she states that this particular bird will start fluttering its wings, readying itself for flight and then fly off from its nest. Such an avian forsaking its nest will then likely not even recall that it had ever stayed there.
That status is simply the essential nature of natural creatures, as well as specific metaphorical birds that may be likened to the muse. If this style of muse abandons its target permanently, it will likely not recall that it had ever inspired any such soul.
Interestingly, Dickinson has her speaker employ the past tense “forgot” but clearly the actual meaning is present tense “forget.” She possibly employed the past tense because it stands in as a closer rime to “thought.”
However, a different interpretation of the meaning may call for the term “forgot” to be understood as the shortened form of the past participle, as in the nest will be “forgotten.” Through her widespread employment of minimalism and ellipsis, the poet has her speaker leave out “nest will be,” requiring the phrase to be understood and, therefore, supplied by the reader’s mind.
Second Stanza: Ranging to New Territories
Traverse broader forests – Build in gayer boughs, Breathe in Ear more modern God’s old fashioned vows –
After rousing its pinions and flying from its nest, this bird will roam in new territories or through “broader forests.” It may reconstruct a new nest in a place deemed happier for its circumstances, that is, “gayer boughs.” The bird will listen to fresh sounds, as it enjoys the many blessings of its Divine Creator, Who has promised to guard and guide all of His creatures.
At this point, the bird has taken on only a few metaphorical qualities. The message could thus be that of merely dramatizing what any young bird might do, after awakening to the marvelous reality of possessing the delicious ability to fly and range wide from its original location.
Third Stanza: Bird in the Heart
This was but a Birdling – What and if it be One within my bosom Had departed me?
The speaker now admits that the little flying creature she has been describing was, in actuality, a simple little bird, or “Birdling.” But then she changes her focus to the “One” that lives in her heart, asking the basic question—what if my little bird-muse leaves me?
In her poem “I have a Bird in spring,” the poet also had her speaker describe her mystical muse as a bird. That poem also plays out as one of her numerous riddle-poems, as she seems to be describing some impossible entity that can fly from her but then return to her and bring her gifts from beyond the sea.
That special metaphorical bird has the power to calm her in times of stress. Similar to “I have a Bird in spring,” which is one of her most profound poems, this one, “It did not surprise me,” remains on the exact same consistent plane of mystical perception.
Unquestionably, the natural creature known as a “bird” as a metaphorical vehicle for the soul (muse or mystically creative spirit) remains quite appropriate, as poet Paul Laurence Dunbar has also demonstrated in his classic masterpiece “Sympathy.”
Fourth Stanza: A Intriguing Inquiry
This was but a story – What and if indeed There were just such coffin In the heart instead?
The speaker offers another admission that up to this point she has been merely speculating about her bird/muse flying off from its nest in her heart/mind/soul. She crafts another inquiry, repeating the curious phrase “[w]hat and if” before her question.
This poignant question employs the term “coffin” indicating the drastic and deadly situation that would exist in her mind/heart/soul, if her bird/muse did actually fly off from her to explore more extensive forests and build nests on more joyful boughs. The speaker affirms her belief that such a loss to her heart and mind would materialize that “coffin,” if such an event ever transpired.
Image: Emily Dickinson This daguerrotype, circa 1847 at age 17, is likely the only authentic, extant image of the poet.
Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death”
Emily Dickinson’s mystical drama features a carriage driver who appears to be a gentleman caller. The speaker abandons both her work and leisure in order to accompany the kind gentleman on a carriage ride. Dickinson’s mystical tendencies are on pull display in this poem.
Introduction with Text of “Because I could not stop for Death”
Emily Dickinson’s mystical drama “Because I could not stop for Death” plays out with a carriage driver who appears to be a gentleman calling on a lady for an evening outing. The speaker leaves off her work as well as her leisure activities in order to accompany the gentleman on the carriage ride to their unspecified festivities.
Certain childhood memories occasionally spur poets to compose verse that is thus influenced by such musing on past memories. Examples of such nostalgic daydreaming include Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill,” Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” and a nearly perfect American-Innovative sonnet by Robert Hayden “Those Winter Sundays.”
In Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death,” the speaker is also gazing back into her past, but this occasion is a much more momentous musing than merely an ordinary childhood recollection. The speaker in this memory poem is recalling the day she died.
The speaker frames the occasion as a metaphoric carriage ride with Death as the gentleman caller. This speaker is peering intuitively into the plane of existence well beyond that of the earth and into the eternal, spiritual level of being.
Interestingly, the procession that the carriage ride follows seems to be echoing the concept that in the process of leaving the physical body at death, the mental faculty encased in the soul, experiences past scenes from its current existence.
Examples of such past-experienced scenes include the riding by a school and observing that the children were playing at recess; then, they drive by a field of grain and observe the sunset. These are scenes that the speaker has undoubtedly experienced during her current incarnational lifetime.
Because I could not stop for Death
Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality.
We slowly drove – He knew no haste, And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility –
We passed the School, where Children strove At recess – in the ring – We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun –
Or rather – He passed Us – The Dews drew quivering and chill – For only Gossamer, my Gown – My Tippet – only Tulle –
We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground – The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground –
Since then – ’tis centuries – and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses’ Heads Were toward Eternity –
Reading of “Because I could not stop for Death”
Commentary on “Because I could not stop for Death”
The speaker avers that she had no inclination to stop what she was doing for the sake of “Death.” Nevertheless, Death—as a kindly carriage driver, appearing to be a gentleman caller—was polite enough to invite her to join him on an outing.
Because of this kind gentleman’s polite demeanor, the speaker gladly leaves off both her ordinary, daily work plus her free time hours in order to accompany the gentleman on what portends to be a simple, pleasant carriage ride, perhaps including some evening social event.
First Stanza: An Unorthodox Carriage Ride
Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality.
In the first stanza, the speaker claims startlingly that she was unable to avail herself to cease her work and leave off her free time for a certain gentleman, whom she names “Death.”
However, that gentleman Death had no problem in stopping for her, and he did so in such a polite fashion that she readily acquiesced to his kindness and agreed to join him for a carriage ride.
The speaker offers an additional shocking remark, noting that the carriage, in which the speaker and gentleman caller Death rode, was transporting not only the speaker and the gentleman but also one other passenger—”Immortality.” Thus, the speaker has begun to dramatize an utterly unorthodox buggy ride.
The kind gentleman Death has picked up the speaker as if she were his date for a simple carriage ride through the countryside, but something otherworldly intrudes immediately with the presence of the third passenger.
By personifying “Death” as a gentleman caller, the speaker imparts to that act a certain level of rationality that levels out fear and trepidation usually associated with the idea of dying.
Second Stanza: The Gentleman Caller
We slowly drove – He knew no haste, And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility –
The speaker then describes her momentous event. She has not only ceased her ordinary work, but she has also concluded her leisure–certainly not unusual for someone who dies.
The gentleman caller Death has been so persuasive in suggesting a carriage ride that the speaker has easily complied with his suggestion. This kind and gracious man was in no hurry; instead, he offered a rhythmically methodical ushering into realms of peace and quiet.
Third Stanza: A Review of a Life Lived
We passed the School, where Children strove At recess – in the ring – We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun –
Next, the speaker reports that she was able to observe children playing at school during recess. She also views cornfields or perhaps fields of wheat. She, then, views the setting of the sun.
The images observed by the speaker may be interpreted as symbols of three stages in each human life: (1) children playing representing childhood, (2) the growing fields of grain symbolizing adulthood, and (3) the setting sun representing old age.
The imagery also brings to mind the well-known concept that a dying person may experience the passing of scenes from one’s life before the mind’s eye. The experience of viewing of past scenic memories from the dying person’s life seems likely to be for the purpose of readying the human soul for its next incarnation.
Fourth Stanza: The Passing Scenes
Or rather – He passed Us – The Dews drew quivering and chill – For only Gossamer, my Gown – My Tippet – only Tulle –
The speaker reveals that she is dressed in very light clothing. On the one hand, she experiences a chill at witnessing the startling images passing before her sight. But is it the light clothing or is it some other phenomenon causing the chill?
Then on the other hand, it seems that instead of the carriage passing those scenes she has described of children playing, grain growing, and sun setting, those scenes may actually be passing the carriage riders. The uncertainly regarding this turn of events once again supports the commonly held notion that the speaker is viewing her life passing before her eyes.
Fifth Stanza: The Pause
We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground – The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground –
By now, the carriage has almost reached its destination, and instead of a gala or festive outing, it is the speaker’s gravesite before which the carriage has momentarily stopped.
Apparently, without shock or surprise, the speaker now dramatically unveils the image of the grave: she sees a mound of dirt, but she cannot see the roof of the building that she expected, and any ornamental moulding that might have decorated the house also remains out of the sight of the speaker who assumes it is “in the Ground.”
Sixth Stanza: Looking Back from Eternity
Since then – ’tis centuries – and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses’ Heads Were toward Eternity –
In the final scene, the speaker is calmly reporting that she remains now—and has been all along—centuries in future time. She speaks plainly from her cosmic, eternal home on the spiritual/astral level of being. She has been reporting only on how events seemed to go on the day she died, that is, that day that her soul left its physical encasement.
She recalls what she saw only briefly just after leaving her physical encasement (body). Yet, the time from the day she died to her time now centuries later feels to her soul as if it were a very short period of time.
The time that has passed, though it may be centuries, seems to the speaker relatively shorter than the earthly day of 24 hours. The speaker avers that on that day the heads of the horses drawing the carriage were pointing “toward Eternity.”
The speaker has unequivocally described through metaphor and metaphysical terminology the transition from life to death. That third occupant of the carriage offered the assurance that the speaker’s soul had left the body but continued to exist beyond that body.
Image: Emily Dickinson – Amherst College – Daguerrotype of the poet at age 17, circa 1847 – likely the only authentic, extant image of the poet
Emily Dickinson’s “Publication – is the Auction”
Emily Dickinson’s “Publication – is the Auction” remains one of the poet’s starkest statements on the value of authenticity in creative effort—in her case the writing of poetry.
Introduction and Text of Emily Dickinson’s “Publication – is the Auction”
In her poem “Publication – is the Auction,” Emily Dickinson has created a speaker who is musing on the issue of allowing one’s inner thoughts to be made public through publication in media, including newspapers, magazines, or books.
Ultimately, she is saying that remaining true to one’s values and beliefs is more important than writing to sell to a wide audience. Dickinson’s spirituality, contingent upon mysticism, gave her the strong will to continue exploring the world for truth and then telling it without reservation.
Her speaker avers that publication of literary works can even become a threat to one’s inner life, as achievement is so often shunted aside solely for the purpose of increasing sales. Her speaker engages metaphors and images in areas of commerce and religion in order to approach a notion of purity.
Her speaker feels that reverence for one’s mental faculties will naturally garner restraint that will ethically prevent rash decisions to expose one’s inner talent to a world interested primarily in financial achievement over literary accomplishments.
Publication – is the Auction
Publication – is the Auction Of the Mind of Man – Poverty – be justifying For so foul a thing
Possibly – but We – would rather From Our Garret go White – unto the White Creator – Than invest – Our Snow –
Thought belong to Him who gave it – Then – to Him Who bear Its Corporeal illustration – Sell The Royal Air –
In the Parcel – Be the Merchant Of the Heavenly Grace – But reduce no Human Spirit To Disgrace of Price –
Commentary on “Publication – is the Auction”
Emily Dickinson published very few poems during her lifetime. Although she seemed to seek publication as she first conversed with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her ultimate goal was to produce a body of work the meant something for her soul. She seemed to learn very quickly and early that publication had its pitfalls, and it seems that she struggled to avoid them.
Stanza 1: “Publication – is the Auction”
Publication – is the Auction Of the Mind of Man – Poverty – be justifying For so foul a thing
The speaker opens with a candid statement that publishing is tantamount to selling one’s soul. Although she buffers the claim by inserting “Mind” instead of soul, the ultimate meaning of inner awareness becomes more comparable to soul-awareness than mere mental capacity and observance.
The speaker avers that selling one’s words is equal to selling one’s own consciousness, not merely the paper, ink, and stream of words across a page. Such an insistence makes it abundantly clear that such a sale cannot be justified. In fact, remaining in “Poverty” is better than engaging in “so foul a thing” as selling one’s inner being.
The speaker then is implying that the creative writer’s mind becomes a mere object that is diminished by such a sordid undertaking. The economy with which the speaker has presented such a sapient idea demonstrates the strength her metaphor is exerting.
One can imagine an auctioneer rattling off numbers above the head of man, who is selling his head’s contents to the highest bidder. Such a scenario mocks the very notion of trying to sell one’s wares that have come into being through deep thought about spiritually vital things.
One might question such a strong stance against publication for money, but it is important to keep in mind that the speaker is no doubt referring to the creation and sale of poetry. The genesis of poetry remains a very different one from writing expository and informative essays and/or news articles.
Even the writing of fiction such as plays, short stories, or novels carries a different moral impact. If the speaker were focusing on those genres, the poem would have undoubtedly taken a very different approach.
Stanza 2: “Possibly – but We – would rather”
Possibly – but We – would rather From Our Garret go White – unto the White Creator – Than invest – Our Snow –
In the second stanza, the speaker switches from the general to the personal. Employing the editorial “We,” she asserts that despite the possibly of living in poverty, first principles and ethics remain inviolable.
Thus, if the poet must leave her “Garret”—symbol for poverty—she need not go rushing toward the marketplace. Instead, she can and must associate herself with purity: she employs “White” as a symbol of that purity. Thus, rather than “invest” her “Snow”—another symbol of purity as well as a metaphor for her creative writing pieces—she will go toward the “White Creator”—the Ultimate symbol of purity.
Investing one’s “Snow” signals turning one’s purity (works of art) into money, and such an exchange would cause those works and the mind that created them to become contaminated. Imagine handling a ball of snow—it does not remain snow but instead it melts into a pool of water.
Although water is a useful commodity, after melting from snow the original element has lost its original defining qualities. A work of art/poem may become further damaged even by the process of being readied for publication: how often have we heard writers lament that their original words were changed by an editor?
The speaker then is asserting that she prefers total obscurity to the compromise demanded by attempts at publication. And she is not asserting this stance out fear but instead out of fidelity to her ethical position regarding her sacred principles and values.
She is implying rather strongly that remaining in poverty is the better way to preserve her inner dedication to truth; that way she need never make excuses for losing spiritual purity.
Stanza 3: “Thought belong to Him who gave it”
Thought belong to Him who gave it – Then – to Him Who bear Its Corporeal illustration – Sell The Royal Air –
The speaker now offers her most profound reason for eschewing publication: because all thought belongs to the Ultimate Reality or God. God owns all thought just as He owns all of the air we breathe. Selling thought then becomes tantamount to selling air—a truly absurd notion, easily assimilated and understood.
The writer/artist becomes an instrument of the Divine, a steward not a proprietor. Ownership is not conferred by merely having taken a thought and shaped it into a poem; the Divine Poet, who awarded the poem to the poet, still owns the work.
Stanza 4: “In the Parcel – Be the Merchant”
In the Parcel – Be the Merchant Of the Heavenly Grace – But reduce no Human Spirit To Disgrace of Price –
In the final stanza, the speaker commands her audience of artists—and likely most important herself as a poet—to accept the package (the art work/poem but think of it as coming from its Divine Source. By thinking thusly, the poet/artist can happily continue to create—as the Great Creator does—but without the stain conferred by the fickle marketplace.
The artist must remain true to her own inner values, and the most natural and divine way to do that is to realize their Source—create for the original Creator alone; the art that is thus produced will reflect only love, beauty, and truth. These qualities are the only ones with which the true artist can contend, for they remain free from taint, stain, and corruption that surge by trying to please multifaceted humankind.
William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” remains one of the most widely misunderstood poems of the 20th century. Many scholars and critics have failed to criticize the exaggeration in the first stanza and the absurd metaphor in the second stanza, which render a potentially fine poem a critical failure.
Introduction with Text of “The Second Coming”
Poems, in order to communicate, must be as logical as the purpose and content require. For example, if the poet wishes to comment on or criticize an issue, he must adhere to physical facts in his poetic drama. If the poet wishes to emote, equivocate, or demonstrate the chaotic nature of his cosmic thinking, he may legitimately do so without much seeming sense.
For example, Robert Bly’s lines—”Sometimes a man walks by a pond, and a hand / Reaches out and pulls him in” / / “The pond was lonely, or needed / Calcium, bones would do,”—are ludicrous [1] on every level. Even if one explicates the speaker’s personifying the pond, the lines remain absurd, at least in part because if a person needs calcium, grabbing the bones of another human being will not take care of that deficiency.
The absurdity of a lake needing “calcium” should be abundantly clear on its face. Nevertheless, the image of the lake grabbing a man may ultimately be accepted as the funny nonsense that it is. William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” cannot be dismissed so easily; while the Yeats poem does not depict the universe as totally chaotic, it does bemoan that fact that events seem to be leading society to armageddon.
The absurdity surrounding the metaphor of the “rough beast” in the Yeats poem renders the musing on world events without practical substance.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Commentary on “The Second Coming”
William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” remains one of the most widely anthologized poems in world literature. Yet its hyperbole in the first stanza and ludicrous “rough beast” metaphor in the second stanza result in a blur of unworkable speculation.
First Stanza: Sorrowful over Chaos
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
The speaker is sorrowing over the chaos of world events that have left in their wake many dead people. Clashes of groups of ideologues have wreaked havoc, and much blood shed has smeared the tranquil lives of innocent people who wish to live quiet, productive lives.
The speaker likens the seemingly out of control situation of society to a falconer losing control of the falcon as he attempts to tame it. Everyday life has become chaotic as corrupt governments have spurred revolutions. Lack of respect for leadership has left a vacuum which is filled with force and violence.
The overstated claim that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” should have alerted the poet that he needed to rinse out the generic hyperbole in favor of more accuracy on the world stage.
Such a blanket, unqualified statement, especially in a poem, lacks the ring of truth: it simply cannot be true that the “best lack all conviction.” Surely, some the best still retain some level of conviction, or else improvement could never be expected.
It also cannot be true that all the worst are passionate; some of the worst are likely not passionate at all but remain sycophantic, indifferent followers. Any reader should be wary of such all-inclusive, absolutist statements in both prose and poetry.
Anytime a writer subsumes an entirety with the terms “all,” “none,” “everything,” “everyone,” “always,” or “never,” the reader should question the statement for its accuracy. All too often such terms are signals for stereotypes, which produce the same inaccuracy as groupthink.
Second Stanza: What Revelation?
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The idea of “some revelation” leads the speaker to the mythological second coming of Christ. So he speculates on what a second coming might entail. However, instead of “Christ,” the speaker conjures the notion that an Egyptian-Sphinx-like character with ill-intent might arrive instead.
Therefore, in place of a second coming of godliness and virtue, as is the purpose of the original second coming, the speaker wonders: what if the actual second coming will be more like an Anti-Christ? What if all this chaos of bloodshed and disarray has been brought on by the opposite of Christian virtue?
Postmodern Absurdity and the “Rough Beast”
The “rough beast” in Yeats’ “The Second Coming” is an aberration of imagination, not a viable symbol for what Yeats’ speaker thought he was achieving in his critique of culture. If, as the postmodernists contend, there is no order [2] in the universe and nothing really makes any sense anyway, then it becomes perfectly fine to write nonsense.
Because this poet is a contemporary of modernism but not postmodernism [3], William Butler Yeats’ poetry and poetics do not quite devolve to the level of postmodern angst that blankets everything with the nonsensical. Yet, his manifesto titled A Vision is, undoubtedly, one of the contributing factors to that line of meretricious ideology.
Hazarding a Guess Can Be Hazardous
The first stanza of Yeats’ “The Second Coming” begins by metaphorically comparing a falconer losing control of the falcon to nations and governments losing control because of the current world disorder, in which “[t]hings fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
Political factions employ these lines against their opposition during the time in which their opposition is in power, as they spew forth praise for their own order that somehow magically appears with their taking the seat of power.
The poem has been co-opted by the political class so often that Dorian Lynskey, overviewing the poem in his essay, “‘Things fall apart’: the Apocalyptic Appeal of WB Yeats’s The Second Coming,” writes, “There was apparently no geopolitical drama to which it could not be applied” [4].
The second stanza dramatizes the speaker’s musing about a revelation that has popped into his head, and he likens that revelation to the second coming of Christ; however, this time the coming, he speculates, may be something much different.
The speaker does not know what the second coming will herald, but he does not mind hazarding a dramatic guess about the possibility. Thus, he guesses that the entity of a new “second coming” would likely be something that resembles the Egyptian sphinx; it would not be the return of the Christ with the return of virtue but perhaps its opposite—vice.
The speaker concludes his guess with an allusion to the birth of such an entity as he likens the Blessed Virgin Mother to the “rough beast.” The Blessèd Virgin Mother, as a newfangled, postmodern creature, will be “slouching toward Bethlehem” because that is the location to which the first coming came.
The allusion to “Bethlehem” functions solely as a vague juxtaposition to the phrase “second coming” in hopes that the reader will make the connection that the first coming and the second coming may have something in common. The speaker speculates that at this very moment wherein the speaker is doing his speculation some “rough beast” might be pregnant with the creature of the “second coming.”
And as the time arrives for the creature to be born, the rough beast will go “slouching” towards its lair to give birth to this “second coming” creature: “its hour come round at last” refers to the rough beast being in labor.
The Flaw of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”
The speaker then poses the nonsensical question: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” In order to make the case that the speaker wishes to make, these last two lines should be restructured in one of two ways:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to give birth?
or
And what rough beast’s babe, its time come at last, Is in transport to Bethlehem to be born?
An unborn being cannot “slouch” toward a destination. The pregnant mother of the unborn being can “slouch” toward a destination. But the speaker is not contemplating the nature of the rough beast’s mother; he is contemplating the nature of the rough beast itself.
The speaker does not suggest that the literal Sphinx will travel to Bethlehem. He is merely implying that a Sphinx-like creature might resemble the creature of the second coming. Once an individual has discounted the return of Jesus the Christ as a literal or even spiritual fact, one might offer personal speculation about just what a second coming would look like.
It is doubtful that anyone would argue that the poem is dramatizing a literal birth, rather than a spiritual or metaphorical one. It is also unreasonable to argue that the speaker of this poem—or Yeats for that matter—thought that the second coming actually referred to the Sphinx. A ridiculous image develops from the fabrication of the Sphinx moving toward Bethlehem. Yeats was more prudent than that.
Exaggerated Importance of Poem
William Butler Yeats composed a manifesto to display his worldview and poetics titled A Vision, in which he set down certain tenets of his thoughts on poetry, creativity, and world history. Although seemingly taken quite seriously by some Yeatsian scholars, A Vision is of little value in understanding either meaning in poetry or the meaning of the world, particularly in terms of historical events.
An important example of Yeats’ misunderstanding of world cycles is his explanation of the cyclical nature of history, exemplified with what he called “gyres” (pronounced with a hard “g.”) Two particular points in the Yeatsian explanation demonstrate the fallacy of his thinking:
In his diagram, Yeats set the position of the gyres inaccurately; they should not be intersecting but instead one should rest one on top of the other: cycles shrink and enlarge in scope; they do not overlap, as they would have to do if the Yeatsian model were accurate.
Image : Gyres – Inaccurate Configuration from A Vision
Image: Gyres – Accurate Configuration
2. In the traditional Second Coming, Christ is figured to come again but as an adult, not as in infant as is implied in Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming.”
Of great significance in Yeats’ poem is the “rough beast,” apparently the Anti-Christ, who has not been born yet. And most problematic is that the rough beast is “slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born.” The question is, how can such a creature be slouching if it has not yet been born? There is no indication the speaker wishes to attribute this second coming fiasco to the mother of the rough beast.
This illogical event is never mentioned by critics who seem to accept the slouching as a possible occurrence. On this score, it seems critics and scholars have lent the poem an unusually wide and encompassing poetic license.
The Accurate Meaning of the Second Coming
Paramahansa Yogananda has explained in depth the original, spiritual meaning of the phrase “the second coming”[5] which does not signify the literal coming again of Jesus the Christ, but the spiritual awakening of each individual soul to its Divine Nature through the Christ Consciousness.
Paramahansa Yogananda summarizes his two volume work The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You:
In titling this work The Second Coming of Christ, I am not referring to a literal return of Jesus to earth . . .
A thousand Christs sent to earth would not redeem its people unless they themselves become Christlike by purifying and expanding their individual consciousness to receive therein the second coming of the Christ Consciousness, as was manifested in Jesus . . .
Contact with this Consciousness, experienced in the ever new joy of meditation, will be the real second coming of Christ—and it will take place right in the devotee’s own consciousness. (my emphasis added)
Interestingly, knowledge of the meaning of that phrase “the second coming” as explained by Paramahansa Yogananda renders unnecessary the musings of Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”and most other speculation about the subject. Still, the poem as an artifact of 20th century thinking remains an important object for study.
The speaker in William Butler Yeats’ “The Fisherman” is dramatically promoting a style of poetry that will become and remain meaningful to and beloved by the common folk.
Introduction with Text of “The Fisherman”
William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Fisherman” appears in the poet’s The Wild Swans at Coole, which was brought out in 1919. The poet’s collection features many of his most widely anthologized poems.
In “The Fisherman,” Yeats has created a speaker who is voicing a call for a genuine school of art for the common folk, an art that dramatizes the beauty and truth inherent in all great art.
The speaker is also decrying the cultural suicide being perpetrated by charlatans in art as well as their cohorts who are power-hungry politicians. He thus reveals contempt for fakes and frauds, while promoting an ideal that he strongly believes should be steering art and the cultural life of the nation.
Every nation throughout history has suffered from these same issues, as toppling governments and bloody wars testify. The poets have often spoken up, calling out names and insisting on reforms.
Despite the fact that poetry’s first function arises from personal experience, political controversy often intrudes into the realm of the personal and that is when poets are compelled to use their platform for activism.
Care must be taken, however, that the poet not become a brazen tool for propaganda. As an accomplished world poet and former Irish senator [1], Yeats possessed the acumen to broach issues of art, poetry, culture, and politics.
The former politician and literary Nobel Laureate [2] boasts numerous works that address culture and politics: “The Fisherman” remains one of the most colorful and culturally significant poems of the era.
The Fisherman
Although I can see him still, The freckled man who goes To a grey place on a hill In grey Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his flies, It’s long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man. All day I’d looked in the face What I had hoped ’twould be To write for my own race And the reality; The living men that I hate, The dead man that I loved, The craven man in his seat, The insolent unreproved, And no knave brought to book Who has won a drunken cheer, The witty man and his joke Aimed at the commonest ear, The clever man who cries The catch-cries of the clown, The beating down of the wise And great Art beaten down.
Maybe a twelvemonth since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man And his sun-freckled face, And grey Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark under froth, And the down turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream: A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, “Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.”
Reading of “The Fisherman”
Commentary on “The Fisherman”
The speaker in William Butler Yeats’ poem is heralding a style of poetry that will be beloved by the common folk. He makes his contempt for charlatans known. He encourages the ideals that he believes must guide culture and art. Yeats was a promoter of the style of art that he thought was closest to the hearts and minds of the Irish.
First Movement: Recalling an Admired Man
Although I can see him still, The freckled man who goes To a grey place on a hill In grey Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his flies, It’s long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man.
The speaker appears to be remembering a special man whom he has respected: “[t]he freckled man” wearing “Connemara clothes.” This man has been in the habit of fishing at a “gray place on a hill.”
The speaker implies that in his mind’s eye, he can still perceive the man. And it may also be that the speaker literally meets the man occasionally in the village. However, the speaker has not as of late mused upon the man.
The speaker admires the man’s simple ways. He assumes that the man is “wise and simple.” The speaker then continues to cogitate upon those very same qualities as he continues his message.
The speaker entertains a deep desire to praise the virtues of simplicity and wisdom. He has observed those qualities in the folks who are doing ordinary, simple everyday tasks.
Second Movement: Researching History
All day I’d looked in the face What I had hoped ’twould be To write for my own race And the reality; The living men that I hate, The dead man that I loved, The craven man in his seat, The insolent unreproved,
The speaker has determined that he will make a plan to write for his own people, including the real experiences they all undergo. With the plan in mind, he has begun to research the history of his nation and its people. The speaker asserts that he hopes to reveal the reality of the lived experience of his fellow citizens.
Such a reality should well acquit itself and at the same time demonstrate and dramatize the exact truths that future generations will be likely to undergo.The speaker offers a catalogue of qualities that the men who make up the current political landscape have put on display.
Some of those men will be the recipients of his ire. He brazenly states that there are living men whom he hates. He then contrasts that negative emotion with its opposite by emphasizing that there is as well the “dead man that [he] loved.”
The speaker continues in his enflamed hatred by asserting that the “craven” exist while the “insolent” remain unrestricted in their perfidy. The speaker believes that by contrasting good and evil, he can demonstrate the efficacy of the arrival of a steady virtue upon which to build a better art and poetry that can represent Irish culture more faithfully and honestly.
Third Movement: The Guilty Avoiding Justice
And no knave brought to book Who has won a drunken cheer, The witty man and his joke Aimed at the commonest ear, The clever man who cries The catch-cries of the clown, The beating down of the wise And great Art beaten down.
The speaker continues referring to the rogues and knaves, who have thus far evaded justice though guilty. The speaker loathes those frauds who have “won a drunken cheer,” even as they have remained undeserving of celebrity and honor.
The speaker makes it clear that there is a sector of despicable characters who damage, cheapen, and pile shame on the culture. The speaker accuses such unscrupulous scoundrels of attempting to destroy the art of the nation.
They, in effect, denigrate “the wise” as they dismantle the “great Art” that they have inherited. The speaker grieves that these killers of culture have succeeded in their perfidy. Thus, he is calling attention to their misdeeds. He is proposing a change in focus in order to improve values. He is not suggesting censorship of the charlatans.
Fourth Movement: Cultural Assassins
Maybe a twelvemonth since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man And his sun-freckled face, And grey Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark under froth,
The speaker then reports that for a while he has been incubating the idea of creating an uncomplicated, “sun-freckled face”—the man in “Connemara cloth.” For his effort, he has thus far received only “scorn” from the ilk of those culture killers and unscrupulous reprobates.
Nevertheless, the speaker has been pressing on, striving to envision a simple fisherman, who “climb[s] up to a place / Where stone is dark with froth,” a natural place that continues to be pristine and still remains alluring.
The speaker is crafting a symbolic being whom he can describe and on whom he can bestow the qualities that he deems must become and remain an important part of the natural art, belonging to the people of his environs.
Fifth Movement: The Importance of Simplicity
And the down turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream: A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, “Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.”
The speaker visualizes the fisherman’s wrist movement as the man casts his line into the water. He admits that this man does not yet exist, because he is still “but a dream.” The speaker’s keen sensibility is strong enough to bring to life such a simple, rustic character. He is urged then to take all pains to bring such a character to life.
Thus, while the poet is still young enough to use his God-given imagination, he vows to take on the task of writing this fisherman into existence and to compose for the man a poem “as cold / And passionate as the dawn.” The speaker continues to muse on simplicity. He passionately desires to create a new ideal that will produce meaningful, original, dramatic poetry.
He insists that that new poetry must be able to speak with genuine originality and that it thus should become a harbinger of the beginning of a new era in art of poetry. The speaker hopes to accomplish all of this despite the wrong-headedness and power-grabbing of too many of the political phonies—and despite the fraudulent deceivers whose selfishness is spreading the destruction of their own culture.
Father Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Habit of Perfection” dramatizes the importance of silencing and stilling each of the five senses in order to advance in the spiritual realm.
Introduction with Text of “The Habit of Perfection”
The title “The Habit of Perfection” of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem features a pun on the term “habit.” As a monk, the poet had accepted the garb of the monastic, sometimes called a habit. Of course, the ordinary meaning of common routine also functions fully.
About the importance of silence, Paramahansa Yogananda has averred, “What joy awaits discovery in the silence behind the portals of your mind no human tongue can tell” (Spiritual Diary).
Jesuit Priest Gerard Manley Hopkins concurs with the Indian guru’s claim. Father Hopkins’ poem dramatizes the bliss of silence in seven rimed quatrains, each with the rime scheme, ABAB, featuring his famous sprung rhythm and inscape techniques. The devotee/speaker commands each of his senses to cease their normal functioning, in order that his soul may meditate in holy silence and commune with the Divine.
The Habit of Perfection
Elected Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.
Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: It is the shut, the curfew sent From there where all surrenders come Which only makes you eloquent.
Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark And find the uncreated light: This ruck and reel which you remark Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.
Palate, the hutch of tasty lust, Desire not to be rinsed with wine: The can must be so sweet, the crust So fresh that come in fasts divine!
Nostrils, your careless breath that spend Upon the stir and keep of pride, What relish shall the censers send Along the sanctuary side!
O feel-of-primrose hands, O feet That want the yield of plushy sward, But you shall walk the golden street And you unhouse and house the Lord.
And, Poverty, be thou the bride And now the marriage feast begun, And lily-coloured clothes provide Your spouse not laboured-at nor spun.
Reading
Commentary on “The Habit of Perfection”
Father Hopkins’ poem “The Habit of Perfection” dramatizes the importance of silencing and stilling each of the five senses in order to advance spiritually to experience union with the Divine Reality.
First Quatrain: Devotee of the Spiritual Path
Elected Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.
The speaker reveals himself to be a devotee on the spiritual path, as he converses with “Elected Silence.” The devotee chooses silence as the place where inner awareness starts, remembering the biblical injunction, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10 King James Version).
The speaker metaphorically likens his Elected Silence to music, capable of singing to him and beating upon his eardrum. This silence “pipe[s him] to pastures” in the mind which he wants to still. He, therefore, asks silence to be “the music that [he cares] to hear.”
Second Quatrain: Commanding the Senses
Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: It is the shut, the curfew sent From there where all surrenders come Which only makes you eloquent.
As an adjunct to the auditory sense, speaking or moving the lips must cease as well as catching sounds with the ear; thus, the speaker bids his lips to remain “lovely-dumb.” He tells his lips to form no sounds, stressing that the eloquent speech of the devotee is in his surrender to the Divine. The devotee must remain silent in order to hear the voice of Divinity.
Third Quatrain: Calming the Sense of Sight
Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark And find the uncreated light: This ruck and reel which you remark Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.
The speaker then bids his eyes remain closed. He commands them to seek “double dark” beyond which they can encounter the “uncreated light.” In their seeking, the eyes may experience flashes of unearthly light that “[c]oils, keeps, and teases simple sight.” But the devotee’s goal is to become so calm that the physical eyes cease to catch mere glimpses, while the single spiritual eye becomes operational.
Fourth Quatrain: Calming the Sense of Taste
Palate, the hutch of tasty lust, Desire not to be rinsed with wine: The can must be so sweet, the crust So fresh that come in fasts divine!
The speaker/devotee orders his sense of taste to cease its intrusion upon the soul. He specifically commands his taste buds not to crave wine. The sense of taste must be subdued by fasting, wherein the urge for food and drink become swallowed up in the bliss of Divine communion.
Fifth Quatrain: Calming the Sense of Smell
Nostrils, your careless breath that spend Upon the stir and keep of pride, What relish shall the censers send Along the sanctuary side!
The sense of smell accompanies the act of breathing, and in meditation, breathing slows until it stops in deepest awareness of the Divine Essence. The speaker commands his nose by asserting the premise that it functions through a sense of pride, which is damaging to the humbleness necessary for Divine awareness.
Sixth Quatrain: Calming the Sense of Touch
O feel-of-primrose hands, O feet That want the yield of plushy sward, But you shall walk the golden street And you unhouse and house the Lord.
The speaker then promises his greedy hands and feet, which desire softness and comfort, that they will be rewarded to walk the golden street, if they cooperate in sacrificing their worldly comforts for heavenly ones.
Seventh Quatrain: Union of Soul and Divine
And, Poverty, be thou the bride And now the marriage feast begun, And lily-coloured clothes provide Your spouse not laboured-at nor spun.
In the final quatrain, the speaker alludes to the Christ’s command not to become overly conscious about one’s clothes:
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. (Matthew 6:28-29 KJV)
The speaker avers that taking Poverty as his bride, he will enjoy all the comforts of heaven. As a monastic, the speaker has taken a vow of poverty or simplicity because he is seeking treasures not afforded by the material world.
As he silences and calms all the senses, his true marriage feast begins, his marriage or union with the Divine Over-Soul, in Whom all worthwhile treasures are acquired and all worthy goals are achieved.
Image: Langston Hughes – Eakins Press Foundation – photo by Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964)
Langston Hughes’ “Harlem”
Langston Hughes’ “Harlem” examines the potential effects of having to postpone dreams or goals. The result of such delay may present itself in numerous ways, and the speaker explores them in this poem through colorful imagery in five dramatic similes and one explosive metaphor.
Introduction with Text of “Harlem”
The title of Langston Hughes’ “Harlem” may be considered somewhat ironic. The Harlem Renaissance became a colorful, vibrant period of flourishing in literary, musical, visual, and other forms of art. Several civil rights activists, including the excellent poet/activist James Weldon Johnson, were active contributors to this flourishing movement.
The irony, however, rests in that fact that many dreams, especially of black American artists, were being realized as never before, yet, the poem engages in speculation about the events that may transpire if dreams are postponed, remaining unrealized.
Still, on the other hand, systemic racism in America was not eliminated until enactment of the Civil Right Act of 1964. Thus Hughes’ speaker was quite timely in speculation that much of the black population was still being subjected to unfavorable conditions, including having to postpone certain dreams of equality of opportunity.
Because this poem’s speaker makes no mention of anything referring to race or ethnicity, the poem’s “dream” could be any desired goal held by any member of any race or ethnic group.
The message of this poem can be applied to any “dream” or “goal” that would have to be postponed, especially if postponed by coercion or unfair competition. The poem’s universal message is what makes it a great poem.
This poem appears in Langston Hughes’ 1951 collection, Montage of a Dream Deferred. The theme of the poem explores the mental and emotional states that the human mind might undergo if forced to postpose or abandon one’s heartfelt dreams and life goals. The poem primarily employs similes but concludes with one explosive metaphor to convey its impact.
The speaker opens the poem questioning what happens when a dream has to be postponed. He moves on to make four further inquiries; he then provides a suggestion and finally concludes with a shocking, explosive question. The inquiries that employ the use of similes turn out to be rhetorical questions; answers to these questions are actually featured within the questions themselves.
This strategy leaves no doubt about the answers to those questions. They are yes/no questions, and the obvious answer is yes in all cases. As “yes or no” questions, they require no further elaboration. The speaker’s point of view on the issue is quite clear: he holds the notion that a dream postponed indefinitely can result in all sorts of damage, including death.
The similes— “like a raisin in the sun,” “like a sore,” “like rotten meat,” “like a syrupy sweet,” “like a heavy load”—form the questioning pattern, with the final simile, however, expressed as a suggestion. Then the metaphor in the conclusion bursts forth with, “or does it explode?“—the most volatile question of all—therefore it receives added italic emphasis.
No one wants to postpone a dream, that is, a goal, regardless of whether it is to buy a new phone or start that new career. But what happens to that dream if it does have to be put off for any reason? Maybe it just languishes in the back of the mind or maybe it causes the individual to behave in a destructive manner.
In roughly 50 words, the speaker has explored a human phenomenon that most, if not all human beings, have experienced in their time on earth. The degree of intensity to which each dream deferred has been subjected is the main theme of the poem. With colorful imagery presented through rhetorical questions, the speaker has created a memorable drama, focusing on a universal human condition.
Harlem
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Commentary on “Harlem”
Langston Hughes’ poem features several perfect rimes in “sun-run,” “meat-sweet,” “load-explode.” The poem employs images: “raisin in the sun,” “fester like a sore,” “stink like rotten meat.” Even the metaphor that contains no noun suggests the subliminal vision of an exploding bomb which includes all the five senses for which the imagery is employed.
First Movement: The Delaying
What happens to a dream deferred?
Most mature, well-adjusted, thinking human beings entertain dreams and goals that they strive to achieve. This poem full of questions begins with a question seeking to know what events might occur after a dream has been postponed: what might such a delay cause the dreamer to do?
Although it surely must be assumed that the “dream” referred to in this poem is one vital to human nature and dignity, such as the desire for individual freedom, personal security, and individual achievement, in reality, it does not matter what the dream is, because each person reacts differently to different circumstances.
Some human minds and hearts are more patient than others. What may set off a volatile reaction from one person may be well tolerated by another. Still, dreams and goals are so important to the life of the dreamer that they occupy the dreamer’s attention in the consciousness much of the time during the day and possibly even in sleep.
It is, therefore, little wonder that if the dreamer hits a roadblock that stalls his/her continuing on the path to fulfillment of a goal, s/he may become disturbed. The speaker in the poem is exploring a range of possible outcomes that may be experienced by differing personalities.
Second Movement: The Drying Up
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
After a dream or goal is allowed to “dry up like a raisin in the sun,” that dream or goal will lose its value. A raisin is a sweet, nutritious food but left out in the sun, it will harden and lose its flavor as well as its nutritional value. The life’s goal of a human being performs a vital role in making that person a successful, contributing member to the culture and society of the human race.
However, if an individual is put off over and over again, admonished that s/he simply has to wait for society’s laws and attitudes to change before s/he can start a business, or become a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or artist, that individual is likely to wither away or “dry up,” particularly emotionally and mentally.
The speaker wishes to place into the consciousness of society that the notion of delaying the dreams of individuals will become an impediment to progress. Talent and ingenuity require nurturing. not being postponed.
Desire to flourish must be encouraged, not kept in the dark of indifference. The drying up of human talent and energy is a waste of human capital; thus the slogan “a mind is a terrible thing to waste” offers a useful claim as well as a clever advertisement for colleges.
The waste of that mind not only affects the individual, but it also affects the entire community and eventually the whole of society. If a country continues to denigrate its native talent, that country is bound to fail.
Third Movement: The Festering
Or fester like a sore— And then run?
The speaker then considers another issue that might arise from a delayed dream; instead of drying up, maybe it will run like a sore that has festered and become all pus infused. We all want our sores to dry up; we do not want them to fester and continue to run.
Restless dissatisfaction might occur if a dream festers and runs. The innocent dreamer might transform into a criminal, perpetrating criminal offenses against whom or what s/he believes to be standing in the way of his/her dreams. Again, the whole of society is lessened by such behavior.
Fourth Movement: The Stinking
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Rotten meat gives off a definite, unpleasant odor. A dream allowed to lie untended in the mind might decay and give off the stench of unfulfilled desires. The unpleasant odor comes from the dead dream, just as the stink spreads from rotten animal flesh.
The “rotten meat” simile is particularly powerful. The stench of decayed flesh remains nearly unbearable to the human nostrils. The speaker has grown particularly suspicious that deferred dreams can ever produce anything resembling a pleasant outcome.
Fifth Movement: The Crusting Over
Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet?
The dried accumulation that forms on syrup or honey bottles left unused for quite some time presents as an unpleasant crust. It is the lack of use has caused that unpleasant accumulation.
The contents of the bottle will become unusable if left long enough, and so it becomes with dreams. Elderly folks often complain that they failed to pursue certain dreams when they were young, and now those dreams have become a bitter memory, a crusty accumulation at the top their bottle of life. The crusted over dreams may present themselves as emotions of hatred, doubt, anger, and despair.
Sixth Movement: The Sagging
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
This stanza does not pose a question; it offers a suggestion that perhaps the postponed dream just bends because of the “heavy load” of deferral. The dreamer has become lazy and lethargic, even clumsy, as s/he trudges along under the heavy load that has become a mighty burden.
The dream continues to weigh heavily on the mind of the dreamer who keeps on wondering what s/he might have accomplished, if given the opportunity. Thus from carrying the burden of doubt, the dreamer may become depressed even lacking the ability to be at all productive.
Seventh Movement: The Exploding
Or does it explode?
All of the possibilities heretofore mentioned in the similes and in the sagging heavy load suggestion of suffering a dream deferred are deficient, shoddy, even possibly life-threatening. While negative in their description, all of the earlier questions imply a certain level of tolerance.
The deferral of those dreams referred to in the similes have affected mostly the dreamer. But the question metaphorically expressed in the final line becomes literally and definitely explosively life-threatening, not only to the dreamer but to his/her surroundings.
The speaker asks, “does it explode?” Bombs explode—as well as anything in a container in which pressure has built up to the point that the container is no longer capable of expanding to accommodate that pressure. If the dreamers no longer harbor a shred of hope for their dreams, they may become such a container under pressure. They may figuratively become a human bomb by employing a destructive device that can maim and kill others in the person’s vicinity.
Miserable dreamers full of despair, grief, and hopelessness may engage in any number of dangerous, life-threatening acts, as they try to hold responsible those they consider to blame for their inability to realize their dreams and life goals.
Image: Langston Hughes. Library of Congress. Photographer Gordon Parks
Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
Langston Hughes’ speaker in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” displays his message in five versagraphic movements, thematically exploring his soul experience with a “cosmic voice,” which includes and unites all of humanity.
Note on Term Usage: Before the late 1980s in the United States, the terms “Negro,” “colored,” and “black” were accepted widely in American English parlance. While the term “Negro” had started to lose it popularity in the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1988 that the Reverend Jesse Jackson began insisting that Americans adopt the phrase “African American.” The earlier more accurate terms were the custom at the time that Langston Hughes was writing.
Introduction and Text of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
Langston Hughes’ speaker in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” displays his message with a “cosmic voice,” which includes and unites all of humanity. The poem plays out in five versagraphic movements, focusing on the theme of soul exploration.
The Cosmic Voice in Poetry
Writers, especially poets, often employ the “cosmic voice” in order to provide a deep and wide view of historical events and vast swaths of space. A device called the omniscient speaker is often used in fiction; that voice is similar to the cosmic voice but much more limited.
Time and space may stretch or contract as needed as the cosmic seer narrates what he experiences. The “cosmic voice” may come to a poet through a vivid imagination; however, it transcends the imagination as a truth teller. Only a few poets have been blessed with such a voice; examples are Emily Dickinson, Rabindranath Tagore, Paramahansa Yogananda, and to a limited degree Walt Whitman.
The cosmic voice imparts truth through deep intuition. The soul of the speaker employing the cosmic voice is, even if only temporarily as is the case with Langston Hughes, becomes aware of its vast and profound knowledge. The cosmic voice speaks from a place far beyond ordinary sense awareness.
Individuals who comprehend the cosmic voice are bequeathed a consciousness far beyond their own sense awareness and thus comprehend the unity of all created things. Those individuals are heralded into the realm of the Cosmic Creator and often remain transformed beings for having experienced that Sacred Locus.
Langston Hughes and the Cosmic Voice
The voice employed in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is not a whining, complaining one so often heard in the protest voices of activists; instead Hughes is employing the cosmic voice—the voice of the soul that knows itself to be a divine entity. That voice speaks with inherent authority; it reports its intuitions so that others might hear and regain their own experiences through its guidance.
Langston Hughes’ speaker in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” imparts his discourse in five versagraphic movements. His theme explores with the cosmic voice that unites all of humanity.
The vital lines that serve as a refrain—”I’ve known rivers” and “My soul has grown deep like the rivers”—work like a chant, instilling in the listener the truth that the speaker wishes to impart. That Langston Hughes was able to employ a cosmic voice in a poem at age seventeen is quite remarkable.
Although some of his later work, even as much of it remained important and very entertaining, descended into the banal and at times even slipshod, no one can deny his marvelous accomplishment with this early poem in which he speaks as a master craftsman.
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
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.
Reading: Langston Hughes reads his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
Commentary on “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
Langston Hughes’ speaker in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” stands as high testimony to the poet’s ability to craft genuine, heartfelt poetry. To have composed such a profound piece of art at such an early age bespeaks a literary marvel.
First Movement: The River as a Symbol
I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
The poem opens with the speaker remarking rather nonchalantly that he has experienced the natural phenomenon known as “rivers.” He has no doubt observed rivers flowing in their channels, and he has become aware that rivers flow through the earth as blood flows through the veins of human beings.
Both flowing rivers and flowing blood must be ancient, but the speaker intuits that the flow of the rivers surely predates that of the appearance of the human being upon the planet. The river image becomes a symbol linking all of humanity from the pre-historic era to the present day.
As the “river” has served to carry the physical encasements (bodies) and mental bodies over the rough terrain of land and rocks, the symbolic river carries the soul on its Divine journey. Readers and listeners will easily intuit the significance of the speaker’s focus as it ranges far beyond the boundaries of the physical, material universe.
Second Movement: Intuitive Awareness
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
This line indicates that the speaker has become aware that through his own soul he can intuit historical events, places, and people, who have existed from the beginning to time. The line becomes a refrain and will be encountered again in the poem because of its great importance.
It becomes quite obvious that the speaker would not have been able to know literally the rivers of antiquity that he claims to “know.” However, through his soul, or mystical awareness, he can. Thus, he again employs the cosmic, thus mystical, voice to fashion his assertion.
Third Movement: Historical Unity
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.
The speaker claims that he “bathed in the Euphrates” at the dawning of Western civilization. From the Euphrates to the Mississippi Rivers, the speaker offers a huge expansion of time and place.
In biblical times to present time, he lays claim to knowledge, again impossible except for soul consciousness. Awareness through the soul is unlimited, unlike the limitations of body and mind. The speaker could not have experienced the Euphrates when “dawns were young.”
But the cosmic voice of the speaker can place itself at any point along the time line of civilization or cosmic creation. In claiming to have built his “hut near the Congo,” the speaker continues his cosmic, mystically inspired journey. He “looked upon the Nile” and “raised the pyramids” only as a cosmic-voiced speaker.
People of all times and climes have been influenced by the river experience. The speaker can thus unite all races, nationalities, creeds, and religions in his gathering of historic experiences within which all those peoples have lived. And he accomplishes this feat through employment of the symbolic force of the “river.”
Emphasizing the American experience, the speaker claims to have “heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln / went / down to New Orleans . . . .” The allusion to President Abraham Lincoln reminds the reader of the process of slave emancipation.
As with all the rivers mentioned, the Mississippi River, an American river, stands as a symbol of the blood of the human race—not naturally segregated into color and national categories. The American Mississippi River, as the earlier mention of rivers has done, symbolizes the human blood of the human race—the only race that scientifically exists.
Fourth Movement: A Soul Chant
I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.
Because of the importance of the “river” as a symbol, the speaker repeats the line, “I’ve known rivers.” Like the line, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers,” this one also serves as a refrain. If the speaker had chanted the line many more times, the poem’s delightful charm would have even been enhanced—that line is that crucial!
The soul, the river, the depth of the soul and the river—all force history to yield a mighty blessing on those who have “known rivers,” and whose souls have grown deep like those rivers.
Thus the speaker offers a brief description of how those river appear: they are extremely old, and they are mystically dark, a measure that alludes to the dark-skinned race with graceful precision, even as it holds all races as having experienced the nature of the mystic river.
Fifth Movement: Life Force and the Symbol of the River
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
The speaker’s soul has grown profoundly deep like the rivers and along with the rivers. Civilizations have grown up and grown deep along rivers all over Planet Earth. The soul that possesses the body is the life force informing and maintaining that body.
Likewise, rivers streaming through the earth give life force to civilizations and also assist in maintaining those civilization with the products and supplies that river travel has allowed over the centuries.
The speaker is taking his own identity from the energetic force of the soul and the river force of the earth. The children of the Divine Creative Reality (God) all spring forth from a common ancestry, a symbolic set of original parents. It has always been rivers that link all of those ancestors as the blood in their veins links them into one family—the Human Race.
The cosmic voice of a young poet—who happened possess the darker hue of skin along the color spectrum—has rendered a statement that could enlighten and reconnect all peoples if only they could listen with their own cosmic awareness.
At the soul level, all human beings remain eternally linked as children of the Great Divine River King (God). That River God flows in the blood of His offspring. And that same River God flows in the rivers of the planet on which they find themselves too often segregated by ignorance of their own common being as sparks of the Divine.
Instead of identifying with the perishable body and changeable mind that too often rule, the simple act of identifying with their own cosmic nature would allow individuals to experience the cosmic voice of their own soul. The simple poet named Langston Hughes has offered a useful template for viewing the world through a cosmic lens in his nearly perfect poem.
Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali #48: “The morning sea of silence… “
Rabindranath Tagore’s poem elucidating a metaphorical and metaphysical journey is number 48 in his most noted collection titled Gitanjali. The poet received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, specifically for that collection.
Introduction with Text from Gitanjali #48: “The Morning Sea of Silence”
Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Laureate for Literature in 1013, translated his collection of poems, Gitanjali, from his original Bengali into English. He numbered each poem and rendered them as prose-poems, and they remain poetry of the highest order.
Readers may encounter Gitanjali #48 wide-spread across the internet titled “The Journey” playing out in eight traditional poetry stanzas. Tagore’s #48 displays in only six verse paragraphs (versagraphs), but those who converted the piece have separated the fourth versagraph into three separate units.
Tagore’s Gitanjali #48 metaphorically elucidates the spiritual journey of the speaker, even as at the outset, he and his fellow trekkers seem to be setting out on an ordinary hike through the landscape of beauty with flowers and birdsong. What happens to the speaker becomes truly astounding and inspiring, as he comes to understand the true nature of the idea of a spiritual journey.
In this poem, the term journey serves as an extended metaphor for meditation. The speaker takes his meditation seat and begins his practice in order to experience union with the Divine Belovèd (God). The speaker employs use of the extended metaphor to reveal dramatically his series of emotions as he continues his metaphorical journey.
Even though the source for the drama could credibly have remained a literal hike through the countryside on the lovely morning, the speaker of the poem remains focused on his inner spiritual journey to unite his soul with his Creator.
Gitanjali #48: “The Morning Sea of Silence”
The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs; and the flowers were all merry by the roadside; and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds while we busily went on our way and paid no heed.
We sang no glad songs nor played; we went not to the village for barter; we spoke not a word nor smiled; we lingered not on the way. We quickened our pace more and more as the time sped by.
The sun rose to the mid sky and doves cooed in the shade. Withered leaves danced and whirled in the hot air of noon. The shepherd boy drowsed and dreamed in the shadow of the banyan tree, and I laid myself down by the water and stretched my tired limbs on the grass.
My companions laughed at me in scorn; they held their heads high and hurried on; they never looked back nor rested; they vanished in the distant blue haze. They crossed many meadows and hills, and passed through strange, far-away countries. All honour to you, heroic host of the interminable path! Mockery and reproach pricked me to rise, but found no response in me. I gave myself up for lost in the depth of a glad humiliation in the shadow of a dim delight.
The repose of the sun-embroidered green gloom slowly spread over my heart. I forgot for what I had travelled, and I surrendered my mind without struggle to the maze of shadows and songs.
At last, when I woke from my slumber and opened my eyes, I saw thee standing by me, flooding my sleep with thy smile. How I had feared that the path was long and wearisome, and the struggle to reach thee was hard!
Reading of Gitanjali #48: “The Morning Sea of Silence”
Commentary on Gitanjali #48: “The Morning Sea of Silence”
The speaker engages a truly astounding spiritual event, placing his experience in a metaphysical setting, and metaphorically elucidating that experience as a simple hike across the landscape.
First Versagraph: The Welcoming Morning Landscape
The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs; and the flowers were all merry by the roadside; and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds while we busily went on our way and paid no heed.
In the first versagraph, the speaker begins by describing the beauty of the morning landscape that surrounds him and his fellow hikers as they set out on their walking excursion.
The first line offers an masterfully crafted metaphor: the early morning “silence” is likened to the waves of an ocean that break into “ripples of bird songs.” While the birds are singing, the flowers by the wayside appear to be “all merry.” The sky is spread out into a golden glow which is “scattered through the rift of the clouds.”
The speaker then states that he and his hiking buddies are in a hurry to get on with their trek, and they therefore take no notice of, and therefore do not cherish, the beauty that has already been bestowed upon them.
Second Versagraph:: Deadly Solemnity
We sang no glad songs nor played; we went not to the village for barter; we spoke not a word nor smiled; we lingered not on the way. We quickened our pace more and more as the time sped by.
The speaker then asserts that he and his fellow trekkers remain quite serious in their coming travel extravaganza; thus, they do not stop to play or sing happy songs. They did not even engage in cheerful banter with one another, nor do they stop in the village to make any purchases.
They remain so deadly solemn that not only do they not even bother to speak, but they also do not deign to smile. They refuse to linger anywhere. They remain in such a great hurry that they continue to speed by faster and faster as time wore on.
Third Versagraph: Taking Needed Rest
The sun rose to the mid sky and doves cooed in the shade. Withered leaves danced and whirled in the hot air of noon. The shepherd boy drowsed and dreamed in the shadow of the banyan tree, and I laid myself down by the water and stretched my tired limbs on the grass.
By noon, the speaker has become distracted by the position of the sun, noting that doves are making their cooing sounds in the shade of the trees. He then takes notice that a shepherd boy is resting in the shade under a tree.
While the sun is so hot and with the doves and shepherd boy enjoying a relief from action, the speaker decides to stop his own active walk. Thus, he lies down upon the grass by the water and stretches out his tired body to enjoy a respite from the strenuous task of hiking.
Fourth Versagraph: Ridicule for Taking a Rest
My companions laughed at me in scorn; they held their heads high and hurried on; they never looked back nor rested; they vanished in the distant blue haze. They crossed many meadows and hills, and passed through strange, far-away countries. All honour to you, heroic host of the interminable path! Mockery and reproach pricked me to rise, but found no response in me. I gave myself up for lost in the depth of a glad humiliation in the shadow of a dim delight.
The speaker’s walking buddies, however, chide him for wishing to take a break and rest. So, they continue on with their walk. As they continue, they strike supercilious poses with their heads in the air. They take no second notice of the speaker, as they disappear into “distant blue haze.”
Nevertheless, the speaker remains in his resting position with the determination to enjoy his leisurely rest, even as the others rapidly continue on with their swift strides. The speaker reports that his fellow hikers are pressing on as they continue to trek through the “meadows and hills.” They show that they are not as lazy as he is. The speaker’s fellows are continuing to push “through strange, far-away countries.”
He gives them credit for their adventuresome nature, and he confesses that he has experienced some guilt for remaining in leisure and not accompanying them, but he just could not urge himself on to continue this particular walking excursion.
The speaker also confesses that he has ambiguous feelings: on the one hand, he feels “lost” not remaining with the others, but on the other hand, he experiences a “glad humiliation,” feeling that he must be reclining “in the shadow of a dim delight.”
Fifth Versagraph: Rethinking the Reason for the Hike
The repose of the sun-embroidered green gloom slowly spread over my heart. I forgot for what I had travelled, and I surrendered my mind without struggle to the maze of shadows and songs.
As the speaker goes on lounging about, he takes notice that the sunset is “spread[ing] over his heart”—an act that unveils for a second time his emotions fraught with ambiguity. Such gloom is “sun-embroidered,” reminiscent of the old saw, “every cloud has a silver lining.”
The dawdling speaker then admits that he can no longer remember why he originally decided to set out on this hike. Thus, he just lets his mental body go, no longer struggling with his true urgings any more. He allows his heart and mind to continue musing through “the maze of shadows and songs.”
Sixth Versagraph: Nearing the Door-Heart of the Divine Creator
At last, when I woke from my slumber and opened my eyes, I saw thee standing by me, flooding my sleep with thy smile. How I had feared that the path was long and wearisome, and the struggle to reach thee was hard!
Finally, the speaker wakes up from his ambiguous torpor; he then realizes that he has discovered what he was searching for. He had surmised that walking such a spiritual path was out of his reach, as it was considered to be such an arduous task.
But after his discovery, he is able to realize that all he had to do was permit his inner self to be guided to the door-heart of the Divine Belovèd. All lesser journeys, including those on the physical plane, become irrelevant as one becomes ensconced in that sacred environment, near the door of the DivineCreator-Father.
Image: Langston Hughes Carl Van Vechten Trust / Beinecke Library, Yale
Life Sketch of Langston Hughes
Hoyt W. Fuller, critic, editor, and founder of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), has pointed out that Langston Hughes possessed a “deceptive and profound simplicity.” Fuller insists that understanding these qualities in Hughes is key to understanding and appreciating his poetry.
Early Life and Education
On February 1, 1902, Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, to James Nathaniel Hughes and Caroline Mercer Langston. The poet’s full name is James Mercer Langston Hughes. His parents divorced when Langston was very young, and he was raised primarily by his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas [1]. In his first autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes reveals,
My grandmother raised me until I was twelve years old. Sometimes I was with my mother, but not often. My mother and father had separated. And my mother, who worked, always traveled about a great deal, looking for a better job.
When I first started to school, I was with my mother a while in Topeka. (And later, for a summer in Colorado, and another in Kansas City.) She was a stenographer for a colored lawyer in Topeka, named Mr. Guy. She rented a room near his office, downtown. So I went to a “white” school in the downtown district.[2]
The poet’s father James Hughes had studied law and had planned to practice, but Jim Crow laws prevented him from taking the bar exam. The elder Hughes then moved to Mexico, where not only was he admitted to the bar, but he also became very successful through the practice of law.
Langstons’ father’s financial success allowed him to become the owner of much property in Mexico City, where nearby he purchased and resided on a huge ranch in the hills. He also became a money lender and foreclosed on mortgages.
About his father, the poet has remarked, “my father was interested in making money to keep.” This attitude contrasted with his mother and his stepfather, who were interested in making money to spend. Thus, his mother and stepfather moved around a great deal to take advantage of better employment.
In 1920, Langston Hughes graduated from Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio. He had hopes of attending Columbia University to study to become a writer, but his father refused to pay for his son’s schooling unless the younger Hughes studied engineering.
Hughes started his university studies at Columbia but stayed for only a year. He found racism at the school intolerable, so he left the university and took a number of jobs to support himself.
In 1929, Hughes completed his university studies at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. The school pays tribute to their most famous graduate with a library named in his honor, Langston Hughes Memorial Library [3].
Full Image: Langston Hughes Carl Van Vechten Trust / Beinecke Library, Yale
Poetry
Langston Hughes opens his first autobiography, The Big Sea, by reporting on a melodramatic event: he is tossing into the ocean one by one all the books he had studied while at Columbia University.
He had recently joined the large merchant ship S. S. Malone as a seaman; he was only twenty-one years old, and he made up his mind that nothing would ever again happen to him that he did not want to have happen.
He became intent on securing his own freedom with his little dramatic ritual of unloading his college books into the ocean. In the life of Langston Hughes, one poetic act often led to another. Four years before this important, liberating act, however, the poet had traveled to Mexico to visit his father to ask for financial assistance to attend the university.
But he reports that his visits with his father in Mexico were mostly unsatisfactory; he could not identify with his father’s mindset. His father hated his own race of people, and he was interested only in making money. However, Langston needed his father’s financial support, so he spent time with him in Mexico.
On this particular trip, while Hughes was only seventeen years old, the poet composed one of his most anthologized poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” He gives details of his inspiration for this poem in The Big Sea; he wrote the poem “just outside of St. Louis, as the train rolled toward Texas”:
It came about in this way. All day on the train I had been thinking about my father and his strong dislike of his own people. I didn’t understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much.
He then describes meeting a number of blacks who had come “up from the South” as he worked at one of his “happiest jobs” at a soda fountain. He reports that he enjoyed “hearing them talk, listening to the thunderclaps of their laughter, to their trouble, to their discussions of the war and the men who had gone to Europe from the Jim Crow South, their complaints over the high rent. . . .” To Hughes, these people seemed to be the “gayest and bravest people possible” as they worked “trying to get somewhere in the world.”
Crossing the Mississippi River at sunset, Hughes peered out of the Pullman window and saw “the great muddy river flowing down toward the heart of the South,” and he started musing on “what the river, the old Mississippi, has meant to Negroes in the past.”
He mused on the tragedy of slaves being sold down the river as the “worst fate” that a slave could suffer. He then began musing on President Abraham Lincoln’s having rafted on the Mississippi down to New Orleans. Lincoln had seen “slavery at it worst, and had decided within himself that it should be removed from American life.”
Hughes’ musing in this creative reverie then turned to additional rivers that had affected the lives of members of his ethnicity: the Congo, the Niger, and the Nile. And then the thought came to him: “I’ve known rivers.”
He wrote down that one line on an envelope holding the letter from his father which he carried in his pocket, and then within the next fifteen minutes, he had composed his magnificent poem, which he titled “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
As one of the most important creative contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes has offered many poems to the American literary canon. A small sample of his poems include “A Mother to Son,” “Madame’s Calling Cards,” “Theme for English B,” “Night Funeral in Harlem,” “Goodbye, Christ,” and “Cross.”
Supporting Himself by Writing
Langston Hughes has been most noted as a poet, and he managed to finish his college education after being awarded a full scholarship based on his proficiency as a poet. After receiving his B.A. degree in 1929, he continued to publish widely, earning for himself the achievement of being a writer, who was able to support himself as an adult solely with his writings [4].
In addition to poetry, which remained his first love, Hughes published three novels, Not without Laughter (1932), Scottsboro Limited (1932), and The Ways of White Folks (1934). In 1935, Hughes was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Gilpin Players (Karamu House) produced six of the poet’s plays in 1936 and 1937. Hughes founded the Negro Theater in Los Angeles in 1939 and composed the script “Way Down South.”
Hughes published eight collections of poems; he also published four books of fiction and six books for children and teens. He added three books of humor to his resume as well as two autobiographies. He also wrote essays and a number of books on black history. As a prominent figure in the civil rights movement, he traveled and lectured widely throughout the world [5].
Illness and Death
In 1967, at the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City, Hughes submitted to t0 a surgical procedure to treat prostate cancer. The surgery was a tragic failure, and he died from complications arising from that medical procedure [6]. Hughes’ body underwent cremation, and his ashes remain interred at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, under the floor of the foyer in the institute.
The artwork on the flooring features a medallion of a human being formed by rivers and includes the line, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers,” from the poet’s inspirational poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
Note on Term Usage: Before the late 1980s in the United States, the terms “Negro,” “colored,” and “black” were accepted widely in American English parlance. While the term “Negro” had started to lose it popularity in the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1988 that the Reverend Jesse Jackson began insisting that Americans adopt the phrase “African American.” The earlier more accurate terms were the custom at the time that Langston Hughes was writing.
Image: Langston Hughes. Portrait by Winold Reiss (1886–1953) – National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
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