Love And Death In Langston Hughes's Song For A Dark Girl

Langston Hughes poem Song for a Dark Girl is a gloomy blues themed description of a young black woman’s lover being brutally lynched in the Deep South. Poems like Song for a Dark Girl were written as a form of expression to both grieve and document such tragedies in the Deep South that were otherwise ignored or in some cases even pardoned. The major themes addressed in the poem are grief, race, religion, love and death all of which are brought into question for the speaker as a result of her “dark young lover” being lynched. The speaker of the poem is clearly different from the author as Langston Hughes was obviously a black man; he adopts the person of a black girl to create the character of the speaker. The title of the poem provides the …show more content…
The love between the young dark girl and her dark young lover is only expressed through the grief she is experiencing from his death. The refrain in the first and third stanza “Way Down South in Dixie/(Break the heart of me)” (lines 1-2/9-10) shows that the speaker is not just grieving, she is broken and lost, her soul is left naked without him. The final lines of the poem “Love is a naked shadow/On a gnarled and naked tree” (lines 11-12) create the image of the speakers lover being naked (as a further form of humiliation) and casting his shadow on a what is now a gnarled or contorted tree, left naked as to only display the horrible image of the hanging man. The tree is given personification through the metaphor with it being twisted and bare like the evil deed is was used for. The lines also create the metaphor that the speaker’s emotion of love like her actual lover is now a shadow, without him she becomes the dark girl. The theme of love in the poem exists through not existing the speakers’ love was taken from her and she can no longer experience that feeling she is left dark and empty like a …show more content…
Langston Hughes uses the person of the dark girl to both inform the reader of the situation in the south on an emotional level and to invite the reader to ponder the question of racism and death presented through the arch of the poem. The dark girl most obvious question is that of religion in the south and the conflicts she has with it due to her race. The conflict of religion opens the door to the question of race and how the supposedly universal theme and comfort of religion is in some ways lacking for blacks in the Deep South. The speaker’s central question posed to the reader is the question of why, she wants an answer for why her lover was killed, although she introduces the answer to her own question through the refrain “way Down South in Dixie” the longing for an explanation for her loss is still present. Through the question of why, Hughes makes the reader ponder over the institution of racism and the effects it has on an individual and universal