Langston Hughes Negro - Essay Example

E. B. Du Bois but the dedication was not mentioned in later publications (Berry). The poet uses ‘The Negro’ instead of ‘A Negro’ signifying that he is speaking for the entire black community, using river as a metaphor for the source of life and wisdom. He says that the heritage of his people is as old as the human existence itself identifying himself with the first human being; he asserts that those roots have grown stronger with time, and the wisdom has grown deeper with the suffering.

Rivers in the poem are the earthly referents for continuity, depth and strength. Hughes mentions them in order of their relevance to the black history. The poet uses the analogy of the muddy waters turning gold for emulating the proclamation of slaves into free people by Abraham Lincoln. The pride in his history is profoundly visible in this poem and so is the poets anguish over the state of the African Americans of his time. He reaffirms his pride when he says that his people have known dusky rivers, referring to the color of the skin of the African people, and at the same time expresses the feeling that they have experienced life in a tougher form than most people which has made them sturdier and stouter.

The poet celebrates the history of his kinsman because he is highly disturbed over their present. This poem holds certain similarities with Marge Piercy’s ‘The Secretary Chant’. . It seems that Piercy thought that such jobs dented the status of women in society and were demoralizing. The poetess uses metaphor to describe that women had no real identity of themselves back then. The poem is written in resentment towards the attitude of the society that projected mundane jobs like that of a secretary to be the only ones suitable for the female gender.

She is presented as a robot devoid of any human value and the absurd analogies are a sign of how baffled and frustrated these jobs make a person. She ends the poem on a serious note indicating the grave implications behind the logic of the poem. She says that she is still a woman deep inside but is currently buried under the burden of the workload of a secretary (Chant). Piercy’s poem matches the theme of Hughes’s poem in that both have made poetry a source of venting out their anguish and sorrow on the status quo of oppression that their own kind were facing at the time when they wrote these poems.

Both use either ‘I’ or ‘My’ to represent themselves as ambassadors of their groups. Both use metaphors in their poems, Hughes using river and Piercy using office supplies. In both the poems the writers have transformed themselves into analogies that represent the characteristics or the feelings of the writer. Both the writers had a strong message behind their poems. Langston leaves a touching message at the end of the poem when he expresses his feelings that the slavery and racism have made the black population more resilient and they would survive long after the torture is over just as they have been surviving for such a long time in this world.

Piercy also terminates her poem at a moving point when she mentions that we should file her under ‘W’ because she wonce was a