Today’s Poem: The Weary Blues

The low modernism of Langston Hughes

Elanor Colburn, Harlem, 1936 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Weary Blues

by Langston Hughes

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
    I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
    He did a lazy sway . . .
    He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
    O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
    Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
    O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan — 
    “Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
    Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
    I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
    And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then sang some more — 
    “I got the Weary Blues
    And I can’t be satisfied.
    Got the Weary Blues
    And can’t be satisfied — 
    I ain’t happy no mo’
    And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

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Though later he became probably the best-known figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes (1901–1967) was often attacked and disparaged during his early career by the Black literary world. In the beginning — especially in the response to his first poetry collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) — the complaint was that he wrote about the underclass in Harlem. And used their patois. And played with the rhythm of jazz. For that matter, that he was a modernist, when what the Black community needed was traditional poetry on uplifting themes, demonstrating the education and social acceptability of the generations decades after slavery. What they didn’t need was anything that could be read as confirming the prejudice that saw Negroes as dancing animals and ill-spoken criminals.

Hughes saw deeper than his critics, however, and the long years would confirm his vision. “The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in The Nation in 1926. “If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. . . . If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either.”

Langston Hughes, c. 1925 (Wikimedia Commons)

Though there are hints of meter in his 1926 poem, “The Weary Blues” — the first two lines are pentameter, for example — the poem is essentially free verse, a modernist construction. But not the high modernism that would eventually triumph, the modernism of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. This was low modernism, a kind of poetry that would run from Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) to Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) and receive a new burst of popularity with the Beat Poets of the 1950s. The influence of Vachel Lindsay is particularly apparent in “The Weary Blues,” with the elements of song and the sad clicking shut of the poem in “He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.”

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