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Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues”

“The Weary Blues” is the title poem in the collection where Hughes also published “Mother to Son.” This collection, which explores everyday Black life from numerous angles, helped establish Hughes’s reputation as a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance. It’s worth looking at these poems together for the way each one incorporates idiomatic Black speech.

Maya Angelou, “Phenomenal Woman”

Angelou’s poem is very different from Hughes’s in subject matter and tone. However, “Phenomenal Woman” can be generative to consider it in relation to “Mother to Son” for the way both poems explore the unique difficulties faced by Black women.

Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask”

Like “Mother to Son,” “We Wear the Mask” explores the challenge of how to endure in the face of oppression. However, Dunbar’s poem takes a rather different approach to this topic. Hughes’s speaker emphasizes the primacy of endurance, which she represents in the metaphor of climbing a staircase. By contrast, Dunbar’s speaker emphasizes the primacy of dignity, which is maintained, in this poem, by retreating behind a mask.

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