The Negro Speaks of Rivers

The poem’s narrative structure—with the speaker’s attention moving from river to river, era to era—implies a parallel between rivers and time. Indeed, rivers and time are often compared to one another: Both always steadily flow in one direction. The poem begins at the beginning of the day, at the beginning of time, and opens with the speaker stating he knows rivers that are as old as the earth and older than humanity. He bathed in the oldest river, the Euphrates, “when dawns were young” (Line 4), and by the end of the poem, his chronicle has moved through time and space to the Mississippi, where “its muddy bosom turn[ed] all golden in the sunset” (Line 7) when Abraham Lincoln sailed down the river to New Orleans in the 1800s. Even though this poem covers an expanse of human history, it does so in a way that integrates those expansive elements, as techniques like repetition and parallelism unite the disparate times and locations while the extended metaphor of rivers builds.

Most scholars maintain there is complexity and ambiguity in the poem’s speaker, who is both personal and collective, both literal and figurative, both autobiographical and historical: The poet himself is the speaker insofar as Hughes expresses a sense of personal identity through the poem, yet the “I” transcends his individual