Literary Stylistics and the Creation of Weariness in “The Weary Blues”
This paper will focus to use the relative knowledge of literary stylistics, deviation and foregrounding to analyze Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues”, and use strong evidence from the poem to support the argument of Hughes’s use of literary stylistics to create and highlight the sentimental elements of weary in this poem. The weary sentimental elements are significant to the theme of this poem. Blues is the music in America which testimony the history of black people’s rough and bumpy life experiences. Blues music is plaintive and sad; it is the music of black people’s melancholy. So in The Weary Blues, Hughes combined this sad music with a very tired black singer, …show more content…
And deserve to be mentioned is that Langston Hughes has used a series of words and phrases, specifically speaking, he used the meaning, rhythm and many other approaches to pass on this weary and sad sentiment. And my paper is going to investigate how Langston Hughes expressed this mood through literary stylistics in The Weary Blues. Since linguistic criticism is used in text analysis; it concentrates on the connections between language choices and the social world (Malmkjaer 1), I am using the linguistic theory as the criticism to argue the weariness in this poem. According to the major fields of the theoretical linguistics are syntax, phonology, morphology, and semantics (Wikipedia), I have found that Langston Hughes has used deviation and foregrounding to enhance the sentimental elements in this …show more content…
In line 6, “He did a lazy sway ...” (Meyer 401), people uses “lazy” very often to describe a person. But Hughes used “lazy” to describe the singer’s action. Hence Hughes is trying to tell us the real laziness is not the sway; it is the description of the singer’s listless condition. And then in lines 9 and 10 “With his ebony hands on each ivory key / He made that poor piano moan with melody.” (Meyer 401) or line 18 “I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--” (Meyer 401), the word “moan” also deviated from its original meaning in these lines, it is used to describe a weak and painful sound, which in this case, contradicts with the word “melody”. This conducts readers to link the moan with the singer’s tedious voice. Additionally in line 32 and 33 “The stars went out and so did the moon. / The singer stopped playing and went to bed”(Meyer 401), Hughes used the technique again with “went out” to express that the night is late and dark, after a long night of singing, the singer is weary and “He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead” (Meyer
This paper will focus to use the relative knowledge of literary stylistics, deviation and foregrounding to analyze Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues”, and use strong evidence from the poem to support the argument of Hughes’s use of literary stylistics to create and highlight the sentimental elements of weary in this poem. The weary sentimental elements are significant to the theme of this poem. Blues is the music in America which testimony the history of black people’s rough and bumpy life experiences. Blues music is plaintive and sad; it is the music of black people’s melancholy. So in The Weary Blues, Hughes combined this sad music with a very tired black singer, …show more content…
And deserve to be mentioned is that Langston Hughes has used a series of words and phrases, specifically speaking, he used the meaning, rhythm and many other approaches to pass on this weary and sad sentiment. And my paper is going to investigate how Langston Hughes expressed this mood through literary stylistics in The Weary Blues. Since linguistic criticism is used in text analysis; it concentrates on the connections between language choices and the social world (Malmkjaer 1), I am using the linguistic theory as the criticism to argue the weariness in this poem. According to the major fields of the theoretical linguistics are syntax, phonology, morphology, and semantics (Wikipedia), I have found that Langston Hughes has used deviation and foregrounding to enhance the sentimental elements in this …show more content…
In line 6, “He did a lazy sway ...” (Meyer 401), people uses “lazy” very often to describe a person. But Hughes used “lazy” to describe the singer’s action. Hence Hughes is trying to tell us the real laziness is not the sway; it is the description of the singer’s listless condition. And then in lines 9 and 10 “With his ebony hands on each ivory key / He made that poor piano moan with melody.” (Meyer 401) or line 18 “I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--” (Meyer 401), the word “moan” also deviated from its original meaning in these lines, it is used to describe a weak and painful sound, which in this case, contradicts with the word “melody”. This conducts readers to link the moan with the singer’s tedious voice. Additionally in line 32 and 33 “The stars went out and so did the moon. / The singer stopped playing and went to bed”(Meyer 401), Hughes used the technique again with “went out” to express that the night is late and dark, after a long night of singing, the singer is weary and “He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead” (Meyer