Langston Hughe’s work was key to the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural and intellectual revival of black music, art, politics, and scholarship. This poem is set in Lenox Avenue in New York City, capturing the music of a Black blues musician and its profound impact on the speaker. For the speaker, blues music conveys not only the power and beauty of black art, but also the enduring struggles and injustices faced by the black community. In this way, while the poem provides almost no information on the speaker, I think it’s safe to assume the speaker is Black based on how the blues music resonance with them so much. The tone of the poem is full of pain, evident in the lines, “He made that poor piano moan with melody,” “played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool,” “Ain’t got nobody but ma self.” This expresses the historical injustice embedded in the blues music. Yet, the poem also infused with a kind of relief and freedom through the blues music as the speaker cries “O Blues!” “Sweet Blues!” suggesting that this painful music elicits both anguish but is also a powerful way to resist and endure racism. 

This poem struck me with how it seamlessly incorporates black music intro its poetic form and and message on racism and art. Hughes not only describes the blues music, but also infuses it into his poetic form. Black Americans brought blues music from South Africa to urban centers in America. During the Harlem Renaissance, leaders invented new artistic and literary forms, much like how this poem doesn’t follow a traditional form as a way to express the black experience in America. While it doesn’t have an established meter or a predictable rhyme scheme, it is still able to recreate the rhythms and sounds of blues music. “Thump, thump, thump, went his food on the floor. / He played a few chords then he sand some more” uses onomatopoeia and a strong rhythm, reminiscent the blues. Most of the poem is written in rhyming couplets but lines 19-22 uses ballad stanza and lines 25-30 rhyme ABABCB, which are forms and rhyme schemes that blues singers often use in their music. This deliberate incorporation and subsequent deconstruction of blues forms within the poem mirror the intricate, improvisational essence of blues music.