Langston Hughes wrote “The Weary Blues” in 1925 during Prohibition and the Harlem Renaissance. The setting of the poem is actually unclear, at first. However, as it goes on it is obvious the speaker is in a bar, or was. The speaker is telling a story. He starts by setting the mood with an alliteration, “droning a drowsy syncopated tune / Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon”. The narrator wants his listener and reader to get a feel for the story he is about to tell. He wants people to know that he enjoyed the experience. Yet, his tone is unhurried and nonchalant, like he just happened to stumble across “the tune o’ those Weary Blues.” He was in a bar that provided entertainment. Once the speaker finishes his rendition of the musician’s song, the setting changes. At the end of the poem, the reader ends up in the musician’s home.
“The Weary Blues” is written in free verse; however, all the lines that are not lyrics to the Weary Blues are rhyming couplets: “Down on Lenox Avenue the other night / By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light.” Night and light rhyme just like tune-croon, key-melody, stool-fool and all the other couplets. The rhymes are not perfect, but when read out loud the rhyme scheme is pleasing to the ear. It is also worth noting that the poem ends with three rhyming lines: “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.” The last three lines are a finite conclusion. The rest of the poem builds and builds until its end.
The music in “The Weary Blues” is a metaphor for life as a black man. The color in the poem is symbolic of the black struggle. It starts with slave spirituals in which “slaves calculatingly created songs of double-entendre as an intellectual strategy” as Hughes does in his poem. When he says, “I heard a Negro play” he is making the musician decidedly black. The lines “with his ebony hands on each ivory key / He made that poor piano moan with melody” continues the reference to color, and decidedly differentiates black from white. Hughes personifies the piano with a humanly moan, but the moan also indicates his abuse of the “ivory key” and the “melancholy tone” of the music.
However, the poem is a celebration of blues. In lines eleven, fourteen and sixteen there are apostrophes to the blues. “O Blues!” and “Sweet Blues” are the speaker’s exclamations of delight. He just cannot contain himself when it comes to the blues. He even notices the musician enjoying the music and adds the onomatopoeia of a “thump, thump, thump.” The Weary Blues is an enjoyable poem and song, yet its message is one of sadness.