The Negro River Speaks

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This paper will attempt to analyze the literal and symbolic meaning of Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” The very first paragraph of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” sets the foundation and the tone of a comparison between two fundamental truths that set all humanities into a challenge point of view. Both authors set the stage as life being a finite yet infinite course of selection, in other words, choices, challenges, and changes impact the outcome. Robert Frost speaks of this analytical analysis as a pathway of change, yet it still represents stability. It is a challenge for a personal selection. Whereas in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” it suggests that it was set in place a path he did not create, he was just challenged to follow it and the following of that path required him to change and make choices.

In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Langston Hughes uses the river in a symbolic form to represent past, present, and the future. He talks about the past in terms of where he came from, what he experienced, and how he lived in the Congo. He uses the present in the form of a river that flows called the Mississippi River during the time Abraham Lincoln was abolishing slavery. Still he longs for a day in which none of it is wasted. Even though as a free person in the Congo it impacted his trip down the Nile to realize the glanderous pyramids in his hope for the future. Hughes introduces the concept of a blossoming time, when the river has carved its course, and created channels in time and into eternity.

Langston Hughes uses the rivers as a form of transition to build the platform for systematic consequences of changes, of challenges, and of choices. While on the other hand, Robert Frost uses the concept of the roads. Robert Frost uses the same kind of comparison to accomplish the same thing that Langston Hughes had accomplished by using the comparison of the rivers. Langston Hughes suggests that there are two opportunities in our lives; there is a blossoming opportunity and there is a stagnant yet unfulfilling opportunity. Although it may be unfulfilling it promises to give us some new awakening to the possibilities of the change and the consequences, as well as challenge a person to become what his life potential is to be.