In the poem The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes personifies the “Blues” to symbolize his deep sense of pain and loss that he expresses through his music. He develops an irregular rhyme scheme to reflect on the colloquial tone of Southern slang that further affirm the notion of music’s ability to bring people together based on their universal cluster of emotions.
The poem starts off with heavy auditory imagery, allowing the audience to picture the piano “rocking back and forth”, while also incorporating adjectives that instill the dull and somber tone. Hughes describes the piano playing in two rhyming couplets, and the following line goes on to picture the colored man himself through a refrain as he “[does] a lazy sway”, revealing that playing gives him a sense of catharsis as he laments his loss.
As the poem progresses the speaker delves deeper into the sad melody of the music, as if the tune is coming straight from his soul. The setting is later identified through the shift from the piano playing to the black man himself. He compares the man to a “musical fool” to connote that he is of low class and this provides an autobiographical sense into the poet’s personal life, in which he could only express his tragedies of poverty and injustice through his music.
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The individual speaker in the poem emphasizes the sense of loneliness and signifies that personal experience the man shares with the music. The poet employs an apostrophe of the colored man addressing the Blues through the juxtaposition “it’s so good that it hurts!”, indicating the misery that comes along with playing. The diction leaves a heavy impact on the reader, as he brings into plays adjectives such as “pale dull pallor” that reflect on the lack of color and life due to the oppression of the colored race that has left them all lackluster. He mentions “ebony hands” that play on “ivory keys” as an attempt to indicate the apparent segregation of the two races that can be brought together and integrated through the love of music.
The second stanza illustrates an internal shift through the onomatopoeia “thump, thump, thump” to further add onto the dreary mood of the poem. The man’s black soul allegedly contradicts the purity that comes with a human soul, degrading the colored race as the shame of humanity. The final four lines shift to the notion of eternal darkness and solitude through a death sleep, moving from the “stars that went out and so did the moon”, and then the silence of the music to the deep sleep “like a man that’s dead”.
The blues in the poem symbolize the internal conflict the man faces with his own self-identity as a regular human being. He uses music to release his frustration against the discrimination of his race, through the association of words to melody and tune. The poet ridicules the notion of segregation through his imagery that clearly displays the harmony that happens as a result of the acceptance of union. The poet manifests his discontent, implying humanity and emotions are indifferent of race and all their experiences and judgement is universal.
