A Black Man Talks of Reaping

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.

“Tired” by Langston Hughes (1931)

After meeting in the 1920s, Hughes and Bontemps became lifelong friends and collaborators. Like Bontemps, Hughes continually addressed racism in the United States. In “Tired,” Hughes, too, uses food symbolism. He suggests cutting open the world—as if it were a piece of fruit—so that people can figure out what is wrong with it. Hughes’s speaker claims that the world isn’t “good” (Line 3) or “beautiful” (Line 4), and Bontemps’s speaker would agree, as the Black man uses agriculture to display a grim, exploitative world. 

“A Miracle for Breakfast” by Elizabeth Bishop (1937) 

Elizabeth Bishop was a 20th-century American poet who spent some of her childhood in Canada. Her poems have a reputation for dense, puzzling imagery, but “A Miracle for Breakfast” contains many of the themes and literary devices of Bontemps’s poem. In Bishop’s poem, a crowd of hungry people wait to receive a crumb from a man on a balcony. The dynamic matches the situation of the Black man, who only reaps what he can hold in his hand—in other words, mere crumbs. Bishop contrasts the tumultuous scene with a predictable form—the sestina.