The Joy Within Blues

Langston Hughes’ poem “The Weary Blues” finds the speaker recounting a story in which he hears a black man singing the blues one night on Lenox Avenue. The speaker of the poem sets the mood early on, using words like “syncopated tune” and “mellow croon” to indicate that the singer is singing something sentimental and soulful. The “pale dull pallor of an old gas light” employs imagery of weak lighting to create a bleak and dreary setting, a parallel of the blues singer’s solitude and depression. Yet, the blues is powerful enough to maintain the singer’s will to live and the speaker’s interest in telling this story in the first place.

Although the singer plays a “sad raggy tune” with “a melancholy tone,” the singer manages to find solace in his music and does so by effectively expressing his emotions in song. The piano is personified in this poem, “I heard […] that old piano moan,” which reinforces the poem’s theme of music having the power to revive even the most hopeless of souls. The piano comes alive when it is played and even moans, almost as if it feels some sort of pain and is crying along with the song.

Towards the end of the poem, the singer expresses suicidal thoughts by singing “I wish that I had died.” However, the singer still goes to sleep with the intent of waking up the next day, indicative of the reviving power that music has on his life. The singer continues to sing the blues in his head even after arriving home at the end of the day, finding hope and a sort of companionship in the tunes that he plays.
Michael G. Cooke analyzes “The Weary Blues” in his 1984 book, writing that the singer of the poem has exhausted himself after an entire day of crooning the blues. Cooke argues that although the singer has “played himself out” with the woe expressed in his song, he unknowingly plays his way into the “heart and mind” of the poem’s speaker. This is made clear when the speaker loses a sense of time and space in the line “the stars went out and so did the moon,” a moment in the poem that depicts how entranced the poem’s speaker is with the blues singer.

Cooke’s words hold true when one looks at the poem from a different perspective and realizes how impactful the music has been on the speaker. The effects can be seen in the speaker’s observations and descriptions of the singer, “his ebony hands on each ivory key.” The speaker is mesmerized by each detail of the singer and the actions he performs that evoke such powerful emotions within him. In the last few lines of the poem, the speaker almost becomes omniscient when he explains that the “Weary Blues” continued echoing through the singer’s head. The speaker’s knowledge of the singer’s actions is so well known, that it can only be implied that the speaker has followed the singer home in fascination. Cooke is correct when he writes that the same blues that seem to have exhausted the singer now stimulates a newfound interest within the speaker. This is an ironic effect of the blues, being that it apparently has the ability to spark both excitement and exhaustion within people.

It is evident throughout this poem that the blues is powerful enough to not only keep the singer alive during the midst of his depression, but is also moving enough to intrigue the speaker beyond his own expectations. Ultimately, “The Weary Blues” effectively captures the unique power of music through the revival of the singer’s motivation in life and through the speaker’s resurgence of interest in music.

Works Cited

“Michael G. Cooke: On ‘The Weary Blues.’” Michael G. Cooke: On “The Weary Blues” |

Modern American Poetry, 1984,

www.modernamericanpoetry.org/criticism/michael-g-cooke-weary-blues.

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