Essay, Research Paper: Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks Of River"

The speaker in Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of River" delivers his claims in a cosmic voice that extends throughout all time and space. This voice includes all peoples.
Hughes' ancestry included three major race groups; he lived as an African-American (Hughes referred to himself as "colored" or "Negro," because he was writing before the term "African-American" was accepted widely); his parents were African-Americans. But Hughes' interests far exceeded racial limitations. He embraced all of life. He suffered the color-line, when racism was strong in early twentieth-century America, but he rose above racial hatred and felt love and compassion for all races. His acceptance is especially evident in "The Negro Speaks of River" spoken by a cosmic voice that includes and unites all people.
The poem begins, "I've known rivers: / I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the / flow of human blood in human veins." The river symbolizes the linkage of all human life from the earliest time to the present. He continues naming rivers that represent the history of Western culture. From the Euphrates to the Mississippi, the history of mankind from Biblical times to the period of the American Civil War is represented. The Euphrates is considered the cradle of Western civilization. The speaker of the poem claims to have "bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young." Thus the cosmic voice begins at the origin of civilization.
The speaker then moves westward to the Congo claiming, "I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep." Here he focuses on the African experience, as he does in the following line, "I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it." Neither claim limits the voice to a black voice, because the white and yellow races have lived along the Congo and were among the slaves employed by the ancient Egyptians in constructing the pyramids. Hughes' cosmic voice unites the races in one cosmic person. He highlights the American experience claiming, "I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln / went down to New Orleans . . . ." Lincoln reminds us of the process of emancipation of slaves, and the Mississippi River symbolizes the human blood of all races.
The speaker repeats "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." Because the soul is the life force of the body, the stream of energy, the person who recognizes that his soul has grown deep recognizes his own identity. In this poem the river symbolizes the link of mankind as the blood in the body is believed to be linked because we are all children of God, and thus we have the common ancestry originating with Adam and Eve, the symbolical first parents. The cosmic speaker portrays selfhood and recognizes his roots, his identity as a child of not only one set of biological parents but as a child of the cosmos (or of God), and he is linked with all humanity, all races, all creeds for all time through the depth of his own soul.


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