Selected Poems of Langston Hughes

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

I am a Negro:

    Black as the night is black,

    Black like the depths of my Africa.