“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes

“The Weary Blues”.

In the selection of this week, a poem that contains an excellent metaphor is “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes. I have enjoyed it and reread it so many times without quenching my thirst of reading it over and over again. The metaphor appears on line 10. But to better grasp its scope let’s reread from line 4 to line 10:
“Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway…
He did a lazy sway…
To the tune o’those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.”(p.1430)

The verb moan usually makes me recall of a windy day when the air flows majestically among the branches of bowing trees and make the leaves produce various whistling sounds. But yet here, the narrator helps us witness how the different “ivory keys” of the piano work together to yield these magnificent sounds of the Weary Blues melody. This metaphor help powerfully the narrator prove the main point of the poem that a black person is simply a human being, with a soul and an identity and who can elegantly express his consciousness in his own style like any one else. The metaphor is in perfect alignment with the previous line where the narrator is stressing that the “ebony hands” of the black pianist are responsible for the melodious production in progress. Thus the metaphor has accomplished its expected role of exposing the inner gift of noble creativity and artistic talent of that particular black pianist who performed some times ago on Malcolm X Blvd, in Harlem.

Works Cited.
Hughes, Langston. The Weary Blues. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Fifth Edition. Norton & Company. 2005: 1429-1430.