18 pages • 36 minutes read
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
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Symbols & Motifs
Rivers
The rivers in this poem symbolize two things. First, they symbolize the lineage with which Hughes identifies as a Black man. He introduces this symbol by comparing the rivers to ancient blood in veins. Blood is generational, and the rivers serve as the cultural blood that is passed down. Even though Hughes cannot trace, with any exactitude, his bloodline to the people who lived along the Euphrates, Nile, or Congo, he is connected to those people and to their great accomplishments. This is important for a man whose society views him as subhuman and seeks to isolate him and rob his soul of hope. By connecting himself with the great river of humanity that came before him, he can draw from the collective strength of his forebears.
The rivers’ second meaning is renewal. Rivers are life-giving. Human beings emerged from the water, and water feeds the agricultural cycle, bringing life to crops and thus to people and civilizations. Water also brings renewed life symbolically in the religious context of baptism, a tradition in which people are spiritually renewed and born again under the flow of water. Hughes reinforces this idea of renewal through the actions he describes being performed with the rivers: The speaker bathes in one, sleeps by one, builds by one. These actions relate to renewal and creation, all things that are brought about by the waters of the river.
The Soul
Hughes’s use of the soul is significant for a number of reasons, the clearest being its association with religious belief. While Hughes’s own religious persuasion is still debated, his writing conveys a fascination with Christianity and uses much Christian imagery. The Christian conception of the soul links human consciousness to something beyond the physical world, connecting humans to God. In this poem, Hughes instead links his soul to his ancestors and to the broader experience of humanity. He argues that these experiences have deepened his soul, giving him a new consciousness and strength. These ancestral connections are part of what makes him who he is now: strong, brave, and wise.
The second significance of the word “soul” relates to its role in the history of the civil rights struggle in America. For example, in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois published his landmark book The Souls of Black Folk—the book coined the term “double consciousness,” denoting the experience of being Black in a culture that viewed Blackness through a disparaging white lens. This lens caused conflict within Black consciousness, as Black individuals would involuntarily internalize the distorted perception and, instead of viewing themselves as whole, would be forced to see themselves as insignificant and inferior. Hughes’s poem fights against this double consciousness, instead viewing his soul through the empowering lens of collective Black historical identity.
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By Langston Hughes
