Figurative Language In Langston Hughes's Weary Blues

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Langston Hughes expresses his poems with the connection of jazz blues music and African Americans expressing themselves by dancing and following the beat to the music rhythm describing flashbacks of the past and comparing them to present day using imagery, figurative language describing and punctuation, which makes the reader think about African Americans in the past and how they are treated different today.
Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri on February 1,1902. When he was a young child his parents divorced, and his father moved to Mexico. His grandmother raised him until he was thirteen, when he moved to Illinois to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Ohio. In Illinois was when Hughes began writing poetry. After he graduated from high school, he spent a year in Mexico then a year at Columbia University in New York City. In 1924, he moved …show more content…

An African American, who is singing and playing a blues number who is being observed, and described by the central narrative voice. Hughes uses similes in these two lines. Line 13 says “ The musician can play the piano like a fool”. Hughes describes the musicians playing like fool. “Fool” is a good thing in this context. Line 35 says “ He slept like a rock or a man that 's dead”. This simile means that he was sleeping so deeply he isn 't moving or that he is resting like a dead man. Another literary term Hughes uses in his poem is personification. He uses personification in lines 10 and 18. Line 10 says, “ He made that poor piano moan with melody”. The musician in the poem is making the piano moan, but pianos don 't moan. However, the sound of the piano makes the speaker feel like the piano is moaning. Line 18 says “ I heard that negro sing, that old piano moan-”. Once again Hughes is making the speaker feel like the piano is moaning, but he is just describing the melody of the piano and the musician’s voice ("The Weary Blues

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