I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Hughes opens the poem with these three lines, which establish the speaker’s singular focus on rivers as a symbol of spiritual development. It’s notable that the poem begins with the repetition of the phrase, “I’ve known rivers.” This phrase immediately suggests that the speaker is someone whose deep experience—here, of “rivers”—has helped develop a strong sense of self-possession. It’s the repetition of “I’ve” that emphasizes the speaker’s self-assurance, and this repetition is echoed in the third line, which begins with the word “my.” Taken together, these opening lines inaugurate a pattern of beginning nearly every line in the poem with either “I” or “my.” The repetition of these two words recalls the tradition of lyric poetry, in which a first-person speaker describes their shifting thoughts and feelings in real time. However, Hughes bucks the lyric tradition by featuring a first-person speaker who doesn’t simply speak for oneself. Indeed, the “Negro” referenced in the title speaks from a communal perspective, effectively giving voice to the development of a collective Black “soul” that has persisted through time and space.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
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.

Lines 4-7 make up the poem’s longest and most sustained stanza. This stanza is built according to the principle of “parallelism,” which means that the lines all share the same basic structure:

“I” + [verbal phrase] + [name of a river] + [secondary action or qualification]

This repeating structure is used to describe how different historical rivers have helped to deepen the speaker’s “soul.” The specific rivers mentioned are all associated with key moments in the speaker’s vision of global Black history. This history encompasses a broad sweep of time and space. It begins with the foundations of human civilization in the Fertile Crescent (irrigated by the Euphrates). It then moves on to major African centers of civilization, including the precolonial Kingdom of Kongo (fed by the Congo River), and Ancient Egypt (nourished by the Nile). Finally, this history moves across the Atlantic Ocean to the American South in the period of slavery. In the poem’s longest, and arguably, most important line, the speaker draws attention to the Mississippi River, its “muddy bosom” symbolizing all that is detestable about slavery. The speaker also nods to the promise of future redemption by noting how, even when “muddy,” the river can still reflect the luminous radiance of a “golden . . . sunset.”

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Lines 8-10 conclude the poem. With their punctuated brevity, these two very short stanzas contrast starkly with the breathlessness of lines 4-7. These stanzas effectively staunch the flow of the language that had rushed headlong in the poem’s long central stanza. And, by slowing the pace down again, the speaker reinstates the same feeling of gravitas that opened the poem. This is done specifically by repeating the same refrains that appeared in the first three lines: “I’ve known rivers” (lines 1-2), and “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” (line 3). What is perhaps most unique and surprising here, though, is the line: “Ancient, dusky rivers.” This is the only line in the entire poem that doesn’t begin with either “I” or “my.” In other words, it’s the one line in the poem that fully centers the rivers rather than the speaker. And significantly, the rivers mentioned here are both “ancient” and “dusky,” a combination of adjectives that registers a certain ambivalence in the symbolic status of rivers. Whereas most of the rivers mentioned in the poem have been life-sustaining for Black civilization and cultural life, one has had a more ambiguous relationship to Black life and freedom: the Mississippi.

Take a Study Break