Langston Hughes The Negro Speaks Of Rivers

Langston Hughes “The Negro Speak of Rivers”
I found Langston Hughes poems to be like a journey. The progression through which he explains the lives of African Americans seems simple but his poems seem to have an underlying significance or meaning. I found his poem “The Negro Speaks of River” to be almost omnipresent in relation toward African Americans, it was as if Hughes was the holder of knowledge from his fellow people. This collective “I” and the connection towards rivers makes me think of an aging man who has seen his people throughout their entire existence and it gives it an otherworldly read. I also see the collective “I” in his poem “I, Too” in which, while “I” is being used to present a person, it can also be representing a collective

Already the reader is under the impression that it is not simply that he has known rivers himself but that the entirety of the African American peoples have known rivers. He goes from the Euphrates River to the Congo and ends at the Mississippi River “when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans,” demonstrating this huge passage of time where he has become wiser and learned to the point where his “soul has grown deep like the rivers” (Hughes 871). I interpreted this to mean that the passage of time has made the culture and the people of the African American culture to deepen and grow, similar to how rivers widen and carve deeper into the earth as time progresses. He describes his knowing of rivers in a way that transcends time, and this led me to the conclusion that in his eyes, the African American culture has always been; it’s old and weary but vivacious and ever-flowing. I agree with Rader on the collective identity that Hughes uses within the poem, as I have previously stated. The point Rader makes that I identified specifically with is that Hughes writes the African American peoples, like they are the rivers mentioned above, and that they “will persist and endure”