Analysis of Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues”

What is the subject and guiding formal principle of Hughes poem?

Blues

What is the poem about?

What it sounds and feel like to experience someone playing the blues in a nightclub or music hall

What does Hughes try to approximate?

The same patterns and emotions that define blues as a musical genre

How does Hughes make the poem feel like someone playing the blues?

Hughes locates the poem in Harlem

Where specifically is the poem located?

a “distinctly unglamorous Lenox Avenue bar, a meeting place for working people.”

Where was blues played before gaining popualrity?

Ordinary spaces

What is the power of blues?

To be able to make even the “pale dull pallor of an old gas light” a space where transformative aesthetic experiences can occur

Beyond location, how does the poem recreate a blues preformance?

Through a direct quotation of the speaker, including the singer’s repetition of life’s problems

Where does the singer talk about life’s problems?

The 2nd stanza

What does the singer say about life’s problems?

“And I can’t be satisfied…And can’t be satisfied…And I wish that I had died”

The repetition of the singers life problems in the poem helps recreate what?

The musical structure of a blues song

What does a blues song typically feature?

A chorus that repeats a series of tribulations or sorrows

What is the poem?

An active presentation of the performance rather than just a description

Other than the structure of a blues song what does the poem recreate?

The texture of blues music

What does the poem incorporate that would be similar to a blues song?

Drowsy syncopated rhythm or a meter that occasionally slips out of an ordered pattern

Why is a drowsy syncopated rhythm added to blues music? 

The elicit a listeners attention

Where does the poem make use of pauses and silences?

Lines 6 - 7 (67)

The words trailing off captures what?

The haunting silent movements of the singer

What have blues singers prominently featured in their songs?

Moans and whispers

What song can moans and whispers be heard?

Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground

Who sang Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground?

Blind Willie Johnson

What is vernacular language?

The ordinary, nonliterary words and phrases

The quotation of the singer preformed what formal function?

It equalizes the language of the poem and the vernacular language of the blues

What does Hughes underscore?

The meaningful artistic methods found in the common folk practices of everyday people

What does Cheryl A. Wall say about the poem?

The poem is the first time that “the unmediated blues voice was heard in American poetry”

How is the singers performance and the poets recounting of it equally important?

They share fundamental structural and linguistic patterns