Week 11, entry one

Bontemps’ and Hughes’ poetry each identify in nature some artifact of black heritage. In Hughes’ poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the speaker traces his toiling to rivers and the accompanying civilizations that rose along those rivers. The slave identity is linked to the richness of those civilizations but the perspective seems to be from the outside looking in. Responsible for the grandeur we can still recognize those civilizations for today but never really credited for it nor ever really benefited from the civilizations.

Bontemps seems to be reminded of suffering when he looks at nature as telling the history of black people. While Hughes explicitly marks the effect of meditating on history and heritage through nature with the line: “My soul has grown deep like rivers,” Bontemps seems to have an implied ruefulness when he writes: “It would be great / To touch the pieces of glory with our hands.” That ruefulness than colors the line “All of them get big in time and people forget / What started them at first” with a disdain. Bontemps seems to point at systems that empower some while leaving others causalities of history with their stories untold. Bontemps writes: “Oh the world is covered with mountains! / Beneath each one there is something buried: / Some pile of wreckage that started it there.”

In some ways Bontemps seems distrustful of the heritage Hughes speaks of. The line “Dust shall yet devour the stones / But we shall be here when they are gone” seems sarcastic and that heritage is perhaps only a lie people tell themselves to make them feel better in light of their deplorable circumstances—chiefly, slavery.