Modern American Poetry

The Poetry of Langston Hughes 405

Still as a whispering heartbeat.

I toss

Without rest in the darkness,

Weary as the tired night,

My soul

Empty as the silence,

Empty with a vague,

Aching emptiness,

Desiring,

Needing someone,

Something. (CP,59)

The passage demonstrates the high stakes of Hughes’s project as a poet who
deals in words, and it implies his effort, as Pound might say, to “modernize”
his perspective by distancing himself from the nonverbal expressiveness of
the blues.
Together, “Summer Night” and “The Weary Blues” scrutinize the view
that the blues is an essentially “black” musical emotion that can never be
individuated for Euro-American readers. By raising this question, Hughes
anticipates Paul Gilroy’s proposition, in his recent study of music and the
black diaspora, that a “topos of unsayability”—a habitual invocation of truths
that cannot be put into words—lies at the heart of black musical culture.^27
Gilroy’s discussion follows in large part from W.E.B. DuBois’s analysis
of African American spirituals in The Souls of Black Folk.DuBois was one of
the first to notice that many things were conventionally left unsaid in the folk
lyrics. Such “omissions and silences,” and the lack of reference to social
conditions, testify to the violent subjugation of enslavement and reflect the
“shadow of fear” that hung over the slaves. DuBois concludes that, in this
crucial respect, the folk idiom imposed constraints on “allowable thought”
and confined poetry “for the most part to single or double lines”:

Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with

another the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but glimpses

here and there, and also with them, eloquent omissions and

silences. Mother and child are sung, but seldom father; fugitive

and weary wanderer call for pity and affection, but there is little

of wooing and wedding; the rocks and the mountains are well

known, but home is unknown.... Of deep successful love there is

ominous silence.... [The] rhythm of the songs, and the limitations

of allowable thought, confined the poetry for the most part to