The Negro Speaks of Rivers

File:Hughes high school 1919 or 1920.jpg

Langston Hughes, dated to 1919 or 1920

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is a poem by American writer Langston Hughes.

Poem

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
      flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
     went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
     bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Composition and publication history

According to Hughes, the poem was written while he was 17 and on a train crossing the Mississippi River on the way to visit his father in Mexico in 1920. Twenty years after its publication, Hughes suggested the poem be turned into a Hollywood film, but the project never went forward.

Analysis

In his early writing, including "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", Hughes was inspired by American poet Carl Sandburg.

See also

• Confluence, an artwork by Robert Stackhouse and Carol Mickett inspired by the poem in the collection of the Indianapolis Art Center.

External links

• The Negro Speaks of Rivers and its writing, from Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography
• The Negro Speaks of Rivers, as printed in The Crisis 60th Anniversary Issue, Nov 1970.
• On "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" at Modern American Poetry