The Full Text of “The Weary Blues”
1Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
2Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
3 I heard a Negro play.
4Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
5By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
6 He did a lazy sway. . . .
7 He did a lazy sway. . . .
8To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
9With his ebony hands on each ivory key
10He made that poor piano moan with melody.
11 O Blues!
12Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
13He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
14 Sweet Blues!
15Coming from a black man’s soul.
16 O Blues!
17In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
18I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
19 “Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
20 Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
21 I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
22 And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
23Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
24He played a few chords then he sang some more—
25 “I got the Weary Blues
26 And I can’t be satisfied.
27 Got the Weary Blues
28 And can’t be satisfied—
29 I ain’t happy no mo’
30 And I wish that I had died.”
31And far into the night he crooned that tune.
32The stars went out and so did the moon.
33The singer stopped playing and went to bed
34While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
35He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
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“The Weary Blues” Introduction
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Langston Hughes's “The Weary Blues,” first published in 1925, describes a black piano player performing a slow, sad blues song. This performance takes place in a club in Harlem, a segregated neighborhood in New York City. The poem meditates on the way that the song channels the suffering and injustice of the black experience in America, transforming that suffering into something beautiful and cathartic. The poem thus reflects on the immense beauty of black art—and the immense pain that lies beneath it.
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“The Weary Blues” Summary
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Playing a sleepy, ragged song, rocking back and forth, and singing in a calm, soft voice, I heard a black man perform. This was on Lenox Avenue a few nights ago. He was playing in the dim light from an old gas lamp. He swayed lazily on the piano bench. He swayed lazily to the tune of the tired blues he played. With his black hands on the white keys, he made that old piano sing mournfully. Oh blues! Rocking back and forth on a rickety stool, he played that sad ragtime tune like someone drunk with music. Lovely blues music, coming from the soul of a black man. Oh blues! In a low, sad voice, I heard that black man sing, the piano accompanying him: “I don’t have anyone in the world. I don’t have anyone but myself. I’m going to stop being sad and get rid of my troubles.
His foot thumped, thumped, thumped on the floor; he played some chords on the piano and then kept singing: “I have the weary blues and I can’t be content. I’ve got the weary blues and I can’t be content. I’m not happy anymore: I wish that I was dead.” He sang that song late into the night, until the stars went dark and the moon did too. He stopped playing and went to bed, while the weary blues music kept playing in his head. He slept as deeply as a rock or a dead man.
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“The Weary Blues” Themes
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The Pain and Beauty of Black Art
“The Weary Blues” is about the power and pain of black art. The poem describes a black blues singer playing in a bar in Harlem late into the night, whose music channels the pain of living in a racist society. For the speaker, this music is a kind of relief: the speaker finds it soothing, even healing, to hear such sorrow transformed into song. But it doesn’t have the same effect on the blues singer himself, for whom channeling so much pain and suffering is exhausting. This tension allows the poem to reflect on both oppression and creativity: it suggests how marginalized people may find solace and power in art, without shying away from how emotionally taxing that creative process can be. In other words, it honors the beauty of black art while also acknowledging the weight of the pain that led to its creation.
For the speaker of “The Weary Blues,” the blues is more than just music—it conveys the suffering and injustice that black people have endured living in a racist society. The music that the speaker hears is full of pain, and described as both “melancholy” and “sad.” Even the piano that the blues singer plays seems to “moan”—as though it were crying out in anguish. As the speaker notes in line 15, this music comes “from a black man’s soul.” The pain it expresses is thus specifically tied to the pain of the black experience and to the trials of life in a racist society. Its pleasure thus comes from the way it negotiates and transforms that pain.
Listening to the blues singer, the speaker experiences a kind of relief and release. Throughout the first stanza, he cries out, “O Blues!” and “Sweet Blues!” In these moments, the music seems to transport the speaker, eliciting cries of rapture and pleasure. Music offers both an acknowledgment of and an escape from the speaker’s own troubles—which may explain why the speaker is so absorbed in the performance. In this way, the poem subtly suggests that musical traditions like the blues help black people resist and endure racism.
But the poem is also attentive to the costs of making and playing such painful music. The singer does not share in the speaker’s release. When the blues singer gets home after playing all night, he sleeps “like a rock or a man that’s dead.” Literally speaking, the simile just suggests that the singer is very tired—and that he sleeps deeply. But the simile’s implications and undertones are a bit darker. They suggest that, for the blues singer, it’s so painful and difficult to play this music that, by the time he’s done, he’s almost dead. Expressing his pain has, in a way, been sucking the life out of him.
“The Weary Blues” thus celebrates the blues as a way of expressing black suffering and as a means of escaping and resisting a racist society. But it also carefully documents the costs of such resistance—the way that it drains and diminishes the artists who channel and express such suffering. Further, “The Weary Blues” isn’t just a description of blues music: the poem itself takes on the form and rhythms of the blues. In writing the poem, Hughes mines the suffering of his community—and takes the weight of that suffering on himself. At the same time, he offers the poem as a source of celebration and pleasure, perhaps hoping the reader will experience the same relief and release that the speaker does.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Weary Blues”
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Lines 1-3
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.The first three lines of “The Weary Blues” introduce the reader to the poem’s setting—and hint at its themes. The speaker is listening to a black blues singer play a “drowsy syncopated tune.” In other words, he’s playing a slow, jazzy song—rocking back and forth as he does so in time with the music.
The poem not only describes the blues singer and his song—it takes on the distinctive rhythm and mood of blues music. In a sense, the poem becomes a piece of blues music. The speaker relies on a range of different formal techniques and poetic devices to achieve this. Note, for instance, the way the poem uses alliteration and consonance in lines 1 and 2 to establish the poem’s rhythm:
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon…The alliterative /d/ sounds in line 1 sound like the tinkling of piano keys, an improvisatory run before the song gets started. The /r/ and /ck/ sounds themselves rock back and forth, establishing a syncopated, swinging rhythm for the poem. And the three lines together work like the introduction to the song—building anticipation until, in line 3, the speaker arrives at a straightforward, satisfying statement: “I heard a Negro play.” (Note that, to build such anticipation, the speaker withholds the main verb of the sentence, “heard,” until line 3.)
The poem thus doesn’t follow a set form—like the sonnet or the villanelle. Instead, it uses its formal elements to help it imitate a blues song. It has no set meter or rhyme scheme—though many of its lines, including lines 1 and 2 form rhyming couplets. Indeed, the poem implicitly rejects European, white, formal techniques. The poem works from the example of the blues—a form of popular music developed by black Americans in the Deep South. It thus makes an implicit argument about the value of black artistic traditions: they are as rich, sophisticated, and accomplished as any European forms.
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Lines 4-8
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway. . . .
He did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
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Lines 9-13
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. -
Lines 14-18
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan— -
Lines 19-22
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.” -
Lines 23-24
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more— -
Lines 25-30
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied—
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.” -
Lines 31-35
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
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“The Weary Blues” Symbols
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Stars
Stars are traditional symbols of hope and guidance. For instance, sailors have historically used the stars to help them navigate on their voyages. They used stars to locate themselves on a dark and threatening ocean. So when the speaker says that the “stars went out” as the blues singer walked home in line 32, that’s a sign that things aren’t going well: the blues singer is traveling in the dark, without the hope or guidance that the stars usually provide. (Note that the speaker doesn’t describe the sun rising.) The speaker thus uses the symbol to suggest that the blues singer is trapped in deep, unrelenting darkness, with no way out. In turn, this suggests how costly it is, how painful to make the art that he does. Reflecting and channeling so much pain has deprived him of hope.
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The Moon
Like the stars, the “moon” is a traditional symbol of hope—and of beauty. Poets often appeal to the moon because it seems so distant from their struggles and suffering. It’s literally above the human world, and it literally looks down on human problems. The moon thus often proves reassuring: as much sorrow and pain as a poet experiences on earth, he or she can be sure that there is something out there that’s above it all, unaffected and supremely beautiful.
But the blues singer lacks that consolation: in line 32 the “moon” goes out. In other words, the moon—and all the beauty and hope it symbolizes—disappears from his life. This suggests some of the costs associated with his art. He channels black pain and suffering, transforming it into beautiful music—but at a price. Doing so seriously damages him, leaves him in a world that has no outlet, no escape, and no hope.
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“The Weary Blues” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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End-Stopped Line
“The Weary Blues” uses end-stop often, though not in any particular pattern. Instead, the poem’s end-stops reflect and reinforce its own music and sense of rhythm. In other words, the poem uses end-stop to help it imitate the distinctive sound and feeling of the blues. The device helps the poem do more than simply describe a blues song: it helps the poem become a blues song in its own right.
One can hear the music of the poem’s end-stops in lines 6-7:
He did a lazy sway…
He did a lazy sway…Both lines are end-stopped—indeed, the lines are identical, repeating each other exactly. They serve as refrains, almost like the chorus of a pop-song. The end-stops make the lines sound definite, contained, even iconic: they give the lines all the punch and definition that a really good chorus needs.
Similarly, in the blues singer’s song, he uses end-stop to mark the ends of musical phrases. Note the way that lines 26 and 28 are both end-stopped:
I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied.Lines 25 and 27 introduce a phrase; lines 26 and 28 complete it and close it off. This stable structure emphasizes the repetition of words and phrases in these lines, making them even more musical. The poem’s end-stops thus bring out the music of the poem’s language—and, in that way, help the speaker imitate the rhythm and feel of the blues.
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Enjambment
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Caesura
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Metaphor
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Simile
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Repetition
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Onomatopoeia
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“The Weary Blues” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Droning
- Drowsy
- Syncopated
- Mellow Croon
- Negro
- Lenox Avenue
- Pallor
- Gas Light
- Sway
- o'
- Blues
- Ebony
- Ivory
- Raggy
- Fool
- Melancholy
- Ain't
- Ma
- I’s Gwine
- Mo'
Droning-
Making a continuous noise (here, this verb refers to the blues musician).
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Weary Blues”
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Form
“The Weary Blues” is a poem in two stanzas. The first is 22 lines long, the second is 12. The poem doesn’t follow a set form like the sonnet or the villanelle. Indeed, it implicitly rejects such forms, suggesting that they’re not adequate to the poem’s task—which is to capture the pain and power of black art. For Langston Hughes, working during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, it was important to break from white, European poetic traditions. He wanted to develop—and acknowledge—literary forms that came from and spoke to the experience of black people in America.
“The Weary Blues” participates directly in that project. Throughout the poem, the speaker tries to recreate the rhythms and sounds of the blues—a form of African American popular music—using alliteration, rhyme, and repetition to do so. In other words, the poem doesn’t simply describe the blues—it also imitates it. In this way, the poem makes a powerful, implicit argument about the blues as a cultural tradition: it is as distinguished, as sophisticated, and as powerful as any of the poetic forms passed down in European traditions.
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Meter
“The Weary Blues” doesn’t have a steady, established meter. Some of its lines are as long as fourteen syllables, some as short as two. Even without meter, though, the poem has a strong rhythm. This rhythm is more like the syncopated rhythm of a blues song than the strictly regimented meters of traditional poetry. Indeed, the poem draws some of its energy from the variety of its rhythms, and the freedom the speaker feels to establish and then break a rhythm. Take a look, for example, at lines 23-24:
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—The opening three words of line 23—“thump, thump, thump”—imitate the sound of the blues singer’s foot pounding on the floor. (Indeed, this is a case of the poetic device onomatopoeia). The line thus starts with three heavy, stressed syllables—as if the blues song is breaking down. But then it snaps back into rhythm.
Although lines 23-24 can’t be scanned in any established meter, they both have a similar number of syllables and they rhyme with each other, pairing “floor” and “more”—two strongly stressed syllables that fall at the end of the line. Meter or not, these lines have a strong and flexible rhythm—much like the blues itself.
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Rhyme Scheme
“The Weary Blues” has an uneven, unpredictable rhyme scheme. Some parts of the poem follow one scheme; some parts follow a different scheme; some parts of the poem don’t rhyme at all. Despite the complexity and irregularity of the poem’s rhyme scheme, all its different rhymes have the same purpose: they are designed to make the poem itself feel musical—like a blues song.
Much of the poem is written in rhyming couplets. The reader can see this in lines 1-2 ("tune"/"croon") and 4-5 ("night"/light"). However, these rhyming couplets are isolated from each other. Each couplet is followed by an interjection, like “I heard a Negro play” in line 3, or “O Blues!” in lines 11 and 16. (Adding to the poem's irregularity, line 3 rhymes with the "sway" that ends lines 6 and 7.) Lines 1-7 thus have the following pattern, which continues to morph unpredictably throughout the rest of the poem:
AABCCBB
In the poem’s final five lines, lines 31-35, the speaker does sustain a series of rhymes without any interruptions or interjections. The final five lines of the poem rhyme AABBB (note that these rhyme sounds being different from the AB sounds above):
... crooned that tune.
... so did the moon.
... went to bed
... through his head.
... a man that’s dead.Taken all together, these rhyming couplets give the poem a musical, bluesy feeling. The rhymes are direct; they sound like the kind of rhymes one might hear in a blues song.
When the speaker quotes the blues singer directly, in lines 19-22 and 25-30, the poem comes even closer to directly imitating the blues. Lines 19-22 rhyme ABCB, which is the structure of a ballad stanza, a traditional form for songs in English:
... all this world,
... but ma self.
... quit ma frownin’
... on the shelf.”Lines 25-30 then rhyme ABABCB. Here, the poem almost follows the standard ABAB rhyme scheme that blues singers usually use in their songs:
... the Weary Blues
... be satisfied.
... the Weary Blues
... be satisfied—
... happy no mo’
... I had died.”The poem’s rhyme scheme is thus complex and irregular—so much so that it hardly deserves to be called a rhyme scheme. But this irregularity is part of the point: it helps the speaker imitate the music—and the loose, improvisational feel—of the blues.
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“The Weary Blues” Speaker
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“The Weary Blues” provides almost no information about its speaker. The reader never learns the speaker’s gender, race, age, or profession—though it’s safe to assume that the speaker is, like the blues singer at the center of the poem, black. The poem is almost entirely absorbed in the “drowsy syncopated tune” that the speaker hears. The speaker describes the blues singer and his song in detail, focusing on the way his body sways with the rhythm, the way his hands move across the keys. The speaker’s personality—and feelings—come through most clearly in the way that the speaker responds to the music: in the poem’s first stanza, the speaker cries out “O Blues!” and “Sweet Blues!” in response. These feel like cries of pleasure and release—as though the speaker experiences a kind of relief in listening to the music. For the speaker, “The Weary Blues” provides release from the speaker's own troubles—the speaker's own suffering as (most likely) a black person living in a racist society.
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“The Weary Blues” Setting
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“The Weary Blues” is set in a blues club on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City. (After the poem was written, Lenox Avenue was renamed Malcolm X Boulevard.) The club is old-fashioned and run-down. For instance, it is lit only by an “old gas light”—a lamp that burns gas. In other words, it doesn’t have electricity—even though by the time the poem was written, New York City had been electrified for many years.
This run-down, squalid setting reflects the difficult conditions that black people endured in New York City: neighborhoods like Harlem were neglected, poorly maintained, and poorly serviced by the City. Despite the seedy, ramshackle setting, however, the blues singer still manages to make great art—music that transports and transforms its listeners. In this way, the speaker suggests that black art manages to triumph over the limitations that racism places on it.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Weary Blues”
Literary Context
“The Weary Blues” was the title poem of Langston Hughes’s first collection of poetry, The Weary Blues (1925). Hughes’s early poems, like “The Weary Blues” were key to the Harlem Renaissance, a literary movement that developed in the 1920s in New York City. During the Harlem Renaissance, black artists, writers, and intellectuals—including Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen—worked to find ways of expressing the full complexity of black life in America. They often used their art to protest against racism and injustice. In doing so, many of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance worked hard to free themselves from white, European artistic traditions. They invented new artistic and literary forms; they found new language and new ways of making art that better expressed the black experience than fusty old poetic traditions like the sonnet.
The reader can see that impulse at work in “The Weary Blues.” In the poem, Hughes not only describes the blues, he also imitates the distinctive sounds and rhythms of blues music. Blues is a form of popular music that developed in the deep South out of African spirituals, work songs, and other musical traditions. As black Americans moved north in the 1920s and 1930s searching for more freedom and economic opportunity, they brought their music with them—and blues musicians from the Deep South began performing regularly in cities like New York and Chicago.
Blues songs are usually written in four-line stanzas; they are repetitive, with lines echoing each other. In lines 19-22 ("'Ain't got nobody ... on the shelf.'") and 25-30, ("'I got the Weary blues ... I had died.'") the speaker directly imitates the lyrics of blues songs. And elsewhere, he does so indirectly, using repetition and alliteration to capture the mood of the music. The poem thus takes a form of popular black music and makes it into poetry. Better, the poem quietly insists that the blues is already as expressive, sophisticated, and significant as any European poetry tradition.
Historical Context
“The Weary Blues” was first published in 1925, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. The 1920s were a difficult period for black Americans. In the South, segregation was legal—with separate schools, accommodations, and even drinking fountains, for blacks and whites. The Ku Klux Klan was resurgent: it terrorized and murdered black people in the South (and across the country). Many black Americans emigrated to the North, where they sought better job prospects and more freedom—a movement that historians call the "Great Migration."
However, things were often just as bad in the North. Once they arrived in cities like Chicago and New York, black migrants were confined to over-crowded, segregated neighborhoods like Harlem (in New York City) and Bronzeville (in Chicago) and forced to live in tiny, poorly maintained apartments. In these tiny neighborhoods, black artists and intellectuals began to gather and launched a number of important literary and artistic movements, designed to protest the oppression under which black communities lived—foremost among them, the Harlem Renaissance.
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More “The Weary Blues” Resources
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External Resources
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Hughes Reads "The Weary Blues" — The poet reads "The Weary Blues" with a blues band accompanying him. (Hughes begins reading the poem around the 1:40 mark).
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More on Hughes's Life — A detailed biography of Langston Hughes from the Poetry Foundation.
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The Harlem Renaissance — A detailed article on the history of the Harlem Renaissance from the Poetry Foundation.
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"What Is the Blues?" — A brief history of the blues from PBS.
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200 Years of Afro-American Poetry — An article by Hughes from the 1960s, in which he lays out his understanding of the history of African American poetry.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Langston Hughes
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