The Negro Speaks of Rivers: Key Poetic Devices

Allusion

An allusion (uh-LOO-zhun) is a passing reference to a literary or historical person, place, or event, often made without explicit identification. Hughes’s use of allusion is subtle but important, and it may be detected in the refrain that gets repeated in lines 3 and 10: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” For contemporary readers, the most obvious allusion in this line was to the African American spiritual “Deep River,” which begins with the following lines:

Deep river, my home is over Jordan.
Deep river, Lord, I want to cross over into campground.
Oh, don’t you want to go to that gospel feast?
That promised land, where all is peace?

Though this spiritual had been around since the mid-nineteenth century, it became popular again when the Black composer Henry Burleigh published a new arrangement in 1917. Hughes likely had the song fresh in his ears when he wrote his poem in 1920. Whereas the song associates crossing the “deep river” with spiritual deliverance, Hughes’s poem associates rivers with the development of the Black “soul.” This word—soul—provides the clue to the second allusion embedded in the line “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” Here, Hughes alludes to The Souls of Black Folk (1903), an influential book by the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, to whom Hughes dedicated the poem when it appeared in his 1926 collection The Weary Blues. Du Bois’s book established the intellectual foundations for discourse on Black liberation throughout the twentieth century.

In addition to these allusions to contemporary aspects of Black popular and intellectual culture, Hughes also alludes to several significant historical events and periods. For instance, the mention of the Euphrates River obliquely alludes to the two earliest human civilizations, Sumer and Mesopotamia. Likewise, the speaker’s reference to the Congo River likely alludes to the precolonial Kingdom of Kongo, which was a sovereign empire founded in the thirteenth century. The reference to the Nile alludes to the Egyptian pharaohs’ use of slaves to build the pyramids. Finally, in line 7 the speaker mentions a time “when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans.” This line alludes to the historic boat trip Lincoln took on the Mississippi River to New Orleans in 1828, when he was still a teenager. During this trip he observed plantation life and likely witnessed a slave auction, and these experiences influenced his later efforts to abolish slavery. Taken together, these historical allusions mark moments of particular significance in the global development of the Black “soul.”

Personification

Personification refers to instances where a speaker gives human-like attributes or feelings to an inanimate object or abstract concept. Only one example of personification appears in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” but it’s a highly significant one. In line 7, which also happens to be by far the longest in the poem, the speaker personifies the Mississippi River:

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

Here, the speaker describes the Mississippi as “singing.” The speaker claims to have heard this iconic American river sing a song at the time when a young Abraham Lincoln traveled south on it to get to New Orleans. Lincoln’s historic trip to New Orleans likely exposed him to the violence of the slave market for the first time, which no doubt played a role in his later work to abolish slavery. As though reflecting the good omen of slavery’s future abolition, the river’s “muddy bosom” turned “all golden in the sunset.” The Mississippi’s historical links both to the enslavement and freedom of Black people clearly indicates its symbolic importance. It’s also the final river the speaker mentions in the chronology of the development of the Black “soul,” suggesting that this river has special significance in the broader history being recounted. Hughes highlights this significance through the technique of personification.

Repetition

Hughes uses repetition for significant rhetorical effect throughout “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Perhaps most important to note is his use of refrain. The term “refrain” refers to any word, phrase, or line that gets repeated over the course of a poem. Hughes uses two refrains. The first refrain is “I’ve known rivers” (lines 1, 2, and 8). The second is “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” (lines 3 and 10). Taken together, these paired refrains emphasize the speaker’s spiritual development. The experience of “knowing” a range of ancient rivers across time and space has enabled the speaker’s soul to attain the spiritual “depths” associated with these same rivers. In addition to his prominent use of refrain, Hughes employs three other forms of repetition. First, consider the powerful phrase “human blood in human veins” (line 2). The emphatic repetition of “human” here represents a technique known as “diacope” (die-ACK-uh-pee), which involves the repetition of a word with one or more words in between. Similarly, Hughes closes the poem with an example of “antistrophe” (an-TIH-struh-fee), which occurs when a series of clauses ends with the same word or phrase (lines 8-10):

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Finally, Hughes’s repeated use of “I’ve” or “I” at the beginning of successive lines is an example of the technique known as “anaphora” (ann-AF-uh-ruh).

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