In the Library
The Weary Blues
Langston Hughes, 1926
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 20 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 8
- Length
- Length 4k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Song of Myself
Walt Whitman
Whitman's expansive 'I' also swells to contain a whole people, but he sings the sprawling American self where Hughes sings one race across millennia.
£1.99
Of Our Spiritual Strivings
W.E.B. Du Bois
Du Bois maps the same doubled Black soul, but in searching prose that traces how a people's long history lives inside a single consciousness.
£1.99
About the book
A voice speaks that bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young, built its hut beside the Congo, raised the pyramids above the Nile, and heard the Mississippi sing beneath Abe Lincoln. It is one 'I,' and it is a whole people, carrying the memory of every river Black life has known across the full length of human time. Langston Hughes wrote it at seventeen, in the few minutes it took his train to cross the Mississippi at dusk, and the poem still moves like deep water, unhurried and immense. Watch what it does with the muddy river turning gold in the sunset, how a despised history is lifted into something ancient and luminous. One line returns, quiet and absolute, a current running beneath all the rest: My soul has grown deep like the rivers. Few poems say so much, so softly, about where a person comes from and how unfathomably far back that reaches.