Children’s Rhymes

“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes (1926)

“The Weary Blues” is one of Langston Hughes’ most famous poems. As with “Children’s Rhymes,” the poem utilizes assonance and reflects Hughes' drive to create poems that sound like jazz or blues. Similar to “Children’s Rhymes,” the poem deals with the difficulties Black people face in the United States. Yet the end of “Children’s Rhymes” ends on a somewhat optimistic note with the narrator disrupting the misleading Pledge of Allegiance, while the end of “The Weary Blues” is rather bleak, as the person in the poem “slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.”

“I, Too” by Langston Hughes (1926)

“I, Too” is another of Langston Hughes’ well-known poems. This poem, too, tackles race in the United States, although it does so with optimism. At first, the Black speaker must eat in the kitchen, but they will “eat well” and “grow strong” and soon eat at the table. The speaker reaffirms their beauty and their Americanness. Put in conversation with “Children’s Rhymes,” “I, Too” suggests that liberty and justice can be for everybody, so the lies detected by the speaker are vanquishable.

“Saturday’s Child” by Countee Cullen (1947)