English Essay

#1

Sure, it's me again witht he 'English Essay' help again, lol. Argh, school started! /sad.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":(" border="0" alt="sad.gif" />

Okay, what I may ask for may be too demanding, but I really need it. My english sucks, I'm just average in it. And you can't believe it, just to START the year, my teacher just blasted us with this ESSAY to write on a Langston Hughes' poem.

The name of the poem is: "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

I've known rivers†™‚¢‚¢¢¢¬…¡‚¬¢‚¬Å¡‚¦
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins†™‚¢‚¢¢¢¬…¡‚¬¢‚¬Å¡‚¦
My soul has grown deep like the rivers†™‚¢‚¢¢¢¬…¡‚¬¢‚¬Å¡‚¦
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young†™‚¢‚¢¢¢¬…¡‚¬¢‚¬Å¡‚¦
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep†™‚¢‚¢¢¢¬…¡‚¬¢‚¬Å¡‚¦
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it†™‚¢‚¢¢¢¬…¡‚¬¢‚¬Å¡‚¦
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†™‚¢‚¢¢¢¬…¡‚¬¢‚¬Å¡‚¦

I've known rivers†™‚¢‚¢¢¢¬…¡‚¬¢‚¬Å¡‚¦
Ancient, dusky rivers†™‚¢‚¢¢¢¬…¡‚¬¢‚¬Å¡‚¦
My soul has grown deep like the rivers†™‚¢‚¢¢¢¬…¡‚¬¢‚¬Å¡‚¦

Okay, the essay question is: How does Langston Hughes' establish the speakers identity in the poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"?

It has to be a page long and I swear, I've tried my best doing it. It just sucks, that's it, I just can't put an essay together.

I need help ASAP

#2

these might give u some insights:

-http://kawa.soe.umich.edu/riverwalk/Tou ... cd927/view

-http://www.123helpme.com/search.asp?tex ... +of+Rivers

#3

Ahh, I love essays...To me, they come as easy as pie...Essays have a format...It is easy to follow...You just have to identify what the hell is going on, and figure three ways to attack it....

How does Langston Hughes' establish the speakers identity in the poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"?

Well, the first thing you need to ascertain, is what is meant by establishing identity...Unless your teacher has spelled it out for you, just look to yourself...

How do you establish who you are..? How do you define yourself three different ways, in three different circumstances...

An example...

I establish myself on this forum with a symbol...We commonly refer to it as an avatar....
I establish myself on this forum with a name...We commonly refer to it s a handle...
I establish myself on this forum with an action...We commonly refer to it as posting...

That's the body of the essay right there...You first decide what it is you need to be addressing (the identity) and then figure ways that you can relate to it...

A quick take:

By saying he first knows water...And a particular body of water at that...A river...A river is always moving, always changing...There is an old saying, you can never step in the same river twice...He esablishes his identiy via comparison...Much in the same way you would try to explain to someone how you looked and didn't have a picture to give them, "I look like so and so..."

Then he goes on to say, I bathed - I built - I looked - I heard...He establishes his identity via action, and then establishes his identity through his senses...

#4

Ah AYHJA, my problem is 'how to put the essay together'...

Your ideas are so great, haha but I just can't put a damn essay together, and it's really affecting me in school.
LoL last time you did that speech essay fo rme, my teacher knew very well I didn't write it, but he still gave me full marks

Lucky I have a new English teacher this year...Argh, I need help.

I tried to do one previously, and I showed her, but she seemed NOT to like it.

#5

the Angle I would take is a common one to Mr. Hughes work... that of the Platonic Ideal Negro. As a almost Jungian archetype of the Black Man... as the source of the being of every black man.

He establishes the common root of a people as modern as they are antedeluvian. Furthermore, his use of Rivers in this piece is emblematic of ancestry, as well as the enduring culture of his rather modest living black community where he found common elements with blacks on other continents. This common quality was part of what postulated the "soul" common to black folk. He uses water this soul, something even in his time known as completely essential to all life, and yet as intangible as the own essence of his race.

The four rivers he establishes are emblematic of the four rivers which converge in Paradise of Eden, and no doubt Langston would have considered the White Man the Angle that God had put in place to make sure the black man stayed out. For these rivers are alll places where civilization was established through efforts of slavery.

that should be enough to get you through it.

Outline should be:

A. General paragraph of Langston Hughes, who had a strong sense of personal history plagued by horrible family conditions. He was only 17 when he wrote this piece, and had contemplated suicide from his horrible relatioship with his father, which may have been the reason he chose the importance of water, as the seed of life, and how he dissociated his black heritage from his father who he despised and women, who he was not sexually attracted to.

B. The elements of the beauty and majesty of black men in the works of Hughes is by far not the only evidence of his homosexuality, but this is no cause to discredit the work of this masterful poet. Discuss how the work is pinnacle to his 17 year old mind, and how despite the notion that people seem to think he was such a masterful poet at such a young age; he was but a young boy, at times writing love poems to a young black lover who was most assuredly male.

C. The rivers he chose, the symbolism of four rivers as the seperation point from Paradise, and a bit about the way they all tie in, as major events in the history of slavery (as well as places homosexuality was not "evil"). Compare his vanity in this piece to pinnacle statements he made like "I am *THE* black poet." He is clearly showing the evidence of water as history, and is establishing the Great Black Man, as an ancient sailor on those waters, who had a sense of navigation that transcended the event of his birth.

I like Hughes work, though it has to be read out loud to convey the emotion..,. but I still maintain much of his work carries a sense of persecution and resentment for living in a world where he was not free to be openly gay, and he also channels that into "the pain of being black". It is for this reason I think his works stand out in this regard. Becuase even among his Black Folk, he would be pariah were he to reveal who he really was inside.

His work is timeless because he represents, to me, the greatest deception. In this poem, he is to be found beneath the waters...

not on the banks of the river as he would have you believe.

#6

Honestly I didn't understand a thing there raum

#7

here is all you need to do,...

READ "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" and summarize and apply it to the poem.

Langston Hughes was VERY explicit in his intentions and sentiments... and likewise his denial also shines through. Don't think for a minute I think less of Hughes for this... in fact, I am rather certain he would have prided himself as much on his flaws as his virtues.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/ ... untain.htm

The Negro and the Racial Mountain

One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet--not a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to write like a white poet"; meaning subconsciously, "I would like to be a white poet"; meaning behind that, "I would like to be white." And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America--this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.

But let us look at the immediate background of this young poet. His family is of what I suppose one would call the Negro middle class: people who are by no means rich yet never uncomfortable nor hungry--smug, contented, respectable folk, members of the Baptist church. The father goes to work every morning. He is a chief steward at a large white club. The mother sometimes does fancy sewing or supervises parties for the rich families of the town. The children go to a mixed school. In the home they read white papers and magazines. And the mother often says "Don't be like niggers" when the children are bad. A frequent phrase from the father is, "Look how well a white man does things." And so the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all virtues. It holds for the children beauty, morality, and money. The whisper of "I want to be white" runs silently through their minds. This young poet's home is, I believe, a fairly typical home of the colored middle class. One sees immediately how difficult it would be for an artist born in such a home to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people. He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian patterns.

For racial culture the home of a self-styled "high-class" Negro has nothing better to offer. Instead there will perhaps be more aping of things white than in a less cultured or less wealthy home. The father is perhaps a doctor, lawyer, landowner, or politician. The mother may be a social worker, or a teacher, or she may do nothing and have a maid. Father is often dark but he has usually married the lightest woman he could find. The family attend a fashionable church where few really colored faces are to be found. And they themselves draw a color line. In the North they go to white theaters and white movies. And in the South they have at least two cars and house "like white folks." Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven. A very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist to climb in order to discover himself and his people.

But then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority---may the Lord be praised! The people who have their hip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. They live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their
religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. 0, let's dance! These
common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They
furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of
American standardizations. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself. Whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear. And they are not ashamed of him--if they know he exists at all. And they accept what beauty is their own without question.

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art. Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their "white" culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work. And when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country, with their innumerable overtones and undertones surely, and especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand. To these the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears. But let us look again at the mountain.

A prominent Negro clubwoman in Philadelphia paid eleven dollars to hear Raquel Meller sing Andalusian popular songs.
But she told me a few weeks before she would not think of going to hear "that woman," Clara Smith, a great black artist, sing
Negro folksongs. And many an upper -class Negro church, even now, would not dream of employing a spiritual in its
services. The drab melodies in white folks' hymnbooks are much to be preferred. "We want to worship the Lord correctly
and quietly. We don't believe in 'shouting.' Let's be dull like the Nordics," they say, in effect.

The road for the serious black artist, then, who would produce a racial art is most certainly rocky and the mountain is high. Until recently he received almost no encouragement for his work from either white or colored people. The fine novels of
Chesnutt' go out of print with neither race noticing their passing. The quaint charm and humor of Dunbar's' dialect verse
brought to him, in his day, largely the same kind of encouragement one would give a sideshow freak (A colored man writing
poetry! How odd!) or a clown (How amusing!).

The present vogue in things Negro, although it may do as much harm as good for the budding artist, has at least done this: it has brought him forcibly to the attention of his own people among whom for so long, unless the other race had noticed him beforehand, he was a prophet with little honor.

The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites. "Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are," say the Negroes. "Be stereotyped, don't go too far, don't shatter our illusions about you, don't amuse us too seriously. We will pay you," say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The colored people did not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of the colored people who did read Cane hate it. They are afraid of it. Although the critics gave it good reviews the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the work of Du Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson, it is truly racial.

But in spite of the Nordicized Negro intelligentsia and the desires of some white editors we have an honest American Negro literature already with us. Now I await the rise of the Negro theater. Our folk music, having achieved world-wide fame, offers itself to the genius of the great individual American composer who is to come. And within the next decade I expect to see the work of a growing school of colored artists who paint and model the beauty of dark faces and create with new technique the expressions of their own soul-world. And the Negro dancers who will dance like flame and the singers who will continue to carry our songs to all who listen-they will be with us in even greater numbers tomorrow.

Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz. I am as sincere as I know how to be in these poems and yet after every reading I answer questions like these from my own people: Do you think Negroes should always write about Negroes? I wish you wouldn't read some of your poems to white folks. How do you find anything interesting in a place like a cabaret? Why do you write about black people? You aren't black. What makes you do so many jazz poems?

But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul--the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile. Yet the Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to say that her race created it and she does not like me to write about it, The old subconscious "white is best" runs through her mind. Years of study under white teachers, a lifetime of white books, pictures, and papers, and white manners, morals, and Puritan standards made her dislike the spirituals. And now she turns up her nose at jazz and all its manifestations--likewise almost everything else distinctly racial. She doesn't care for the Winold Reiss' portraits of Negroes because they are "too Negro." She does not want a true
picture of herself from anybody. She wants the artist to flatter her, to make the white world believe that all negroes are as smug and as near white in soul as she wants to be. But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering "I want to be white," hidden in the aspirations of his people, to "Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro--and beautiful"?

So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, "I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet," as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world. I am ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the manner of the academicians because he fears the strange unwhiteness of his own features. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose.

Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand. Let Paul Robeson singing "Water Boy," and Rudolph Fisher
writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas's drawing
strange black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to
catch a glimmer of their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

THE NATION, 1926

#8

And how do I apply this raum?

#9

did you try actually reading it? or any of the stuff posted or linked on here?

dude was black, had issues with people who were trying to divorce themselves of being black.

he was proud of being black, and saddened by those who were not proud of being black, which was a common sentiment in the raging harlem renniasance he felt at home in. he felt this was an unescapable character, as unescapable as people's dependency on water, which he well illustrates in this poem. one of the reasons for this fierce pride in being black was because he felt a solidarity in it he never got in his family, and especially from his father, and it gave him a common point for human support where his homosexual nature would have made him an outcast.

#10

Habib - there is plenty here for multiple papers... Try as you might, I doubt anyone is going to step forward and say, "let me just write it for you". A little mental exercise will do you good.

Try posting what you have written and we will critique it and help you polish it, but you've already got several outlines here that should serve as a skeleton for you to hang your thoughts on.