Selected Poems of Langston Hughes Read online

  VINTAGE CLASSICS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1990

  Copyright © 1959 by Langston Hughes

  Copyright renewed 1987 by George Houston Bass, Surviving Executor of the Estate of Langston Hughes, Deceased

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1959.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hughes, Langston, 1902–1967.

  [Poems. Selections]

  Selected poems of Langston Hughes

  p. cm. —(Vintage classics)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-94940-0

  I. Title II. Series.

  PS3515.U274A6 1990 90-50179

  811’.52—dc20

  Display typography by Stephanie Bart-Horvath

  v3.1

  To my cousin, Flora

  This book contains a selection of the poems of Langston Hughes chosen by himself from his earlier volumes:

  THE WEARY BLUES

  FINE CLOTHES TO THE JEW

  SHAKESPEARE IN HARLEM

  FIELDS OF WONDER

  ONE-WAY TICKET

  MONTAGE OF A DREAM DEFERRED

  and from the privately printed limited edition

  DEAR LOVELY DEATH

  together with a number of new poems published here for the first time in book form, some never before anywhere.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  AFRO-AMERICAN FRAGMENTS

  Afro-American Fragment

  The Negro Speaks of Rivers

  Sun Song

  Aunt Sue’s Stories

  Danse Africaine

  Negro

  American Heartbreak

  October 16

  As I Grew Older

  My People

  Dream Variations

  FEET OF JESUS

  Feet o’ Jesus

  Prayer

  Shout

  Fire

  Sunday Morning Prophecy

  Sinner

  Litany

  Angels Wings

  Judgment Day

  Prayer Meeting

  Spirituals

  Tambourines

  SHADOW OF THE BLUES

  The Weary Blues

  Hope

  Late Last Night

  Bad Morning

  Sylvester’s Dying Bed

  Wake

  Could Be

  Bad Luck Card

  Reverie on the Harlem River

  Morning After

  Early Evening Quarrel

  Evil

  As Befits a Man

  SEA AND LAND

  Havana Dreams

  Catch

  Water-Front Streets

  Long Trip

  Seascape

  Moonlight Night: Carmel

  Heaven

  In Time of Silver Rain

  Joy

  Winter Moon

  Snail

  March Moon

  Harlem Night Song

  To Artina

  Fulfilment

  Gypsy Melodies

  Mexican Market Woman

  A Black Pierrot

  Ardella

  When Sue Wears Red

  Love

  Beale Street

  Port Town

  Natcha

  Young Sailor

  Sea Calm

  Dream Dust

  No Regrets

  Troubled Woman

  Island

  DISTANCE NOWHERE

  Border Line

  Garden

  Genius Child

  Strange Hurt

  Suicide’s Note

  End

  Drum

  Personal

  Juliet

  Desire

  Vagabonds

  One

  Desert

  A House in Taos

  Demand

  Dream

  Night: Four Songs

  Luck

  Old Walt

  Kid in the Park

  Song for Billie Holiday

  Fantasy in Purple

  AFTER HOURS

  Midnight Raffle

  What?

  Gone Boy

  50–50

  Maybe

  Lover’s Return

  Miss Blues’es Child

  Trumpet Player

  Monroe’s Blues

  Stony Lonesome

  Black Maria

  LIFE IS FINE

  Life Is Fine

  Still Here

  Ballad of the Gypsy

  Me and the Mule

  Kid Sleepy

  Little Lyric

  Fired

  Midnight Dancer

  Blue Monday

  Ennui

  Mama and Daughter

  Delinquent

  S-sss-ss-sh!

  Homecoming

  Final Curve

  Little Green Tree

  Crossing

  Widow Woman

  LAMENT OVER LOVE

  Misery

  Ballad of the Fortune Teller

  Cora

  Down and Out

  Young Gal’s Blues

  Ballad of the Girl Whose Name Is Mud

  Hard Daddy

  Midwinter Blues

  Little Old Letter

  Lament over Love

  MAGNOLIA FLOWERS

  Daybreak in Alabama

  Cross

  Magnolia Flowers

  Mulatto

  Southern Mammy Sings

  Ku Klux

  West Texas

  Share-Croppers

  Ruby Brown

  Roland Hayes Beaten

  Uncle Tom

  Porter

  Blue Bayou

  Silhouette

  Song for a Dark Girl

  The South

  Bound No’th Blues

  NAME IN UPHILL LETTERS

  One-Way Ticket

  Migrant

  Summer Evening

  Graduation

  Interne at Provident

  Railroad Avenue

  Mother to Son

  Stars

  To Be Somebody

  Note on Commercial Theatre

  Puzzled

  Seashore through Dark Glasses

  Baby

  Merry-Go-Round

  Elevator Boy

  Who But the Lord?

  Third Degree

  Ballad of the Man Who’s Gone

  MADAM TO YOU

  Madam’s Past History

  Madam and Her Madam

  Madam’s Calling Cards

  Madam and the Rent Man

  Madam and the Number Writer

  Madam and the Phone Bill

  Madam and the Charity Child

  Madam and the Fortune Teller

  Madam and the Wrong Visitor

  Madam and the Minister

  Madam and Her Might-Have-Been

  Madam and the Census Man

  MONTAGE OF A DREAM DEFERRED

  Montage of a Dream Deferred

  WORDS LIKE FREEDOM

  I, Too

  Freedom Train

  Georgia Dusk

  Lunch in a Jim Crow Car

  In Explanation of Our Times

  Africa

  Democracy

  Consider Me

  The Negro Mother

  Refugee in America

  Freedom’s Plow

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  AFRO-

  AMERICAN


  FRAGMENTS

  Afro-American Fragment

  So long,

  So far away

  Is Africa.

  Not even memories alive

  Save those that history books create,

  Save those that songs

  Beat back into the blood—

  Beat out of blood with words sad-sung

  In strange un-Negro tongue—

  So long,

  So far away

  Is Africa.

  Subdued and time-lost

  Are the drums—and yet

  Through some vast mist of race

  There comes this song

  I do not understand,

  This song of atavistic land,

  Of bitter yearnings lost

  Without a place—

  So long,

  So far away

  Is Africa’s

  Dark face.

  The Negro Speaks of Rivers

  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.

  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.

  I’ve known rivers:

  Ancient, dusky rivers.

  My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

  Sun Song

  Sun and softness,

  Sun and the beaten hardness of the earth,

  Sun and the song of all the sun-stars

  Gathered together—

  Dark ones of Africa,

  I bring you my songs

  To sing on the Georgia roads.

  Aunt Sue’s Stories

  Aunt Sue has a head full of stories.

  Aunt Sue has a whole heart full of stories.

  Summer nights on the front porch

  Aunt Sue cuddles a brown-faced child to her bosom

  And tells him stories.

  Black slaves

  Working in the hot sun,

  And black slaves

  Walking in the dewy night,

  And black slaves

  Singing sorrow songs on the banks of a mighty river

  Mingle themselves softly

  In the flow of old Aunt Sue’s voice,

  Mingle themselves softly

  In the dark shadows that cross and recross

  Aunt Sue’s stories.

  And the dark-faced child, listening,

  Knows that Aunt Sue’s stories are real stories.

  He knows that Aunt Sue never got her stories

  Out of any book at all,

  But that they came

  Right out of her own life.

  The dark-faced child is quiet

  Of a summer night

  Listening to Aunt Sue’s stories.

  Danse Africaine

  The low beating of the tom-toms,

  The slow beating of the tom-toms,

      Low … slow

      Slow … low—

      Stirs your blood.

                           Dance!

  A night-veiled girl

      Whirls softly into a

      Circle of light.

      Whirls softly … slowly,

  Like a wisp of smoke around the fire—

      And the tom-toms beat,

      And the tom-toms beat,

  And the low beating of the tom-toms

      Stirs your blood.

  Negro

  I am a Negro:

      Black as the night is black,

      Black like the depths of my Africa.

  I’ve been a slave:

      Caesar told me to keep his door-steps clean.

      I brushed the boots of Washington.

  I’ve been a worker:

      Under my hand the pyramids arose.

      I made mortar for the Woolworth Building.

  I’ve been a singer:

      All the way from Africa to Georgia

      I carried my sorrow songs.

      I made ragtime.

  I’ve been a victim:

      The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo.

      They lynch me still in Mississippi.

  I am a Negro:

      Black as the night is black,

      Black like the depths of my Africa.

  American Heartbreak

  I am the American heartbreak—

  Rock on which Freedom

  Stumps its toe—

  The great mistake

  That Jamestown

  Made long ago.

  October 16

  Perhaps

  You will remember

  John Brown.

  John Brown

  Who took his gun,

  Took twenty-one companions

  White and black,

  Went to shoot your way to freedom

  Where two rivers meet

  And the hills of the

  North

  And the hills of the

  South

  Look slow at one another—

  And died

  For your sake.

  Now that you are

  Many years free,

  And the echo of the Civil War

  Has passed away,

  And Brown himself

  Has long been tried at law,

  Hanged by the neck,

  And buried in the ground—

  Since Harpers Ferry

  Is alive with ghosts today,

  Immortal raiders

  Come again to town—

  Perhaps

  You will recall

  John Brown.

  As I Grew Older

  It was a long time ago.

  I have almost forgotten my dream.

  But it was there then,

  In front of me,

  Bright like a sun—

  My dream.

  And then the wall rose,

  Rose slowly,

  Slowly,

  Between me and my dream.

  Rose slowly, slowly,

  Dimming,

  Hiding,

  The light of my dream.

  Rose until it touched the sky—

  The wall.

  Shadow.

  I am black.

  I lie down in the shadow.

  No longer the light of my dream before me,

  Above me.

  Only the thick wall.

  Only the shadow.

  My hands!

  My dark hands!

  Break through the wall!

  Find my dream!

  Help me to shatter this darkness,

  To smash this night,

  To break this shadow

  Into a thousand lights of sun,

  Into a thousand whirling dreams

  Of sun!

  My People

  The night is beautiful,

  So the faces of my people.

  The stars are beautiful,

  So the eyes of my people.

  Beautiful, also, is the sun.

  Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

  Dream Variations

  To fling my arms wide

  In some place of the sun,

  To whirl and to dance

  Till the white day is done.

  Then rest at cool evening

  Beneath a tall tree

  While night comes on gently,

      Dark like me—

  That is my dream!


  To fling my arms wide

  In the face of the sun,

  Dance! Whirl! Whirl!

  Till the quick day is done.

  Rest at pale evening …

  A tall, slim tree …

  Night coming tenderly

      Black like me.

  FEET

  OF

  JESUS

  Feet o’ Jesus

  At the feet o’ Jesus,

  Sorrow like a sea.

  Lordy, let yo’ mercy

  Come driftin’ down on me.

  At the feet o’ Jesus

  At yo’ feet I stand.

  O, ma little Jesus,

  Please reach out yo’ hand.

  Prayer

  I ask you this:

  Which way to go?

  I ask you this:

  Which sin to bear?

  Which crown to put

  Upon my hair?

  I do not know,

  Lord God,

  I do not know.

  Shout

  Listen to yo’ prophets,

      Little Jesus!

  Listen to yo’ saints!

  Fire

  Fire,

  Fire, Lord!

  Fire gonna burn ma soul!

  I ain’t been good,

  I ain’t been clean—

  I been stinkin’, low-down, mean.

  Fire,

  Fire, Lord!

  Fire gonna burn ma soul!

  Tell me, brother,

  Do you believe

  If you wanta go to heaben

  Got to moan an’ grieve?

  Fire,

  Fire, Lord!

  Fire gonna burn ma soul!

  I been stealin’,

  Been tellin’ lies,

  Had more women

  Than Pharaoh had wives.

  Fire,

  Fire, Lord!

  Fire gonna burn ma soul!

  I means Fire, Lord!

  Fire gonna burn ma soul!

  Sunday Morning Prophecy

  An old Negro minister concludes his sermon in his loudest voice, having previously pointed out the sins of this world:

  … and now

  When the rumble of death

  Rushes down the drain

  Pipe of eternity,

  And hell breaks out