Thursday, February 20, 2014

Describe the blues based on how "The Weary Blues" presents this kind of music.

Despite the implication of the title, “The Weary Blues,”
the process of singing his song of suffering seems to change the speaker’s mood from
pain to acceptance, even peace. “The Weary Blues” is Hughes’s attempt to capture in
poetry the musical traditions of his people. Although he won a prize for this poem in
1925, many critics black and white objected to his inclusion of folk-music traditions
and Negro dialect, claiming that both reinforced Negro stereotypes. Hughes’s use of
rhyming and rhythmical lines to tell his story of the blues that originate in “a black
man’s soul” underscore the relation between words and music in African-American culture.
The setting of “The Weary Blues” is a bar in Harlem in the 1920s and details such as“old
gas light” and “rickety stool” evoke the place and the time period. The “droning” voice
of the speaker of “The Weary Blues” betrays the phonic complexities of the poem’s title.
His use of repetition, exclamation marks, and direct speech continue to echo the
“droning” sounds of the weary blues of the Harlem bar.

No comments:

Post a Comment

How is Anne's goal of wanting "to go on living even after my death" fulfilled in Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl?I didn't get how it was...

I think you are right! I don't believe that many of the Jews who were herded into the concentration camps actually understood the eno...