In Sylvester’s Dying Bed, the vernacular familiar to Hughes from childhood is paramount. In other poems, Standard English is used, but here, the speaker’s story is unique to its organic roots. The words dont just tell the story, they are the story. Of course, this gives the poem a tune of its own, we hear the voice of an immigrant, the mourning of loss is not just any mourning, it is unique to the customs/wailings/tune of its culture, which gives the poem its melodic quality; swayin’ an’ chantin’.
Hughes seems to be telling a story that he does not want lost in translation. It is the story of life, death, love. Perhaps for Hughes they are inseparable from their ethnic roots; for once they are cut off/ integrated to the faceless melting pot, these fundamentals can be rendered meaningless; general concepts perceived by the general population instead of the unique individual interacting the irreplaceable family.
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Yes, this is all generally true; in a journal, you'd want to bear down on details of this particular poem, beginning with its form, to get at the significance of some of these specific cultural references you note--and how the poem confronts particular conflicts in that cultural experience. It is in the form of a blues lyric or ballad, written in vernacular, as you note, placing the speaker/singer in a particular socio-economic context; the imagery also reveals the philosophy/mindset of that class, and how its life experiences rub against the conventional religious myths also typically associated with that class (no "pearly gates," for eg., at the end of this life...); so the poem is a social commentary, rooted in the experience of a particular socio-economic class and challenging some of the stereotypes associated with that class, while at the same time being written in a dialect stereotypical of that class... so, we might say, it works through the stereotypes, of both form and content, associated with African-Americanness (i.e., stereotypically "black" language, forms, and attitudes) to get at some of the underlying realities of the black experience and challenge the hollowness of those same stereotypes...an ambiguous poem to be sure, mostly due to that final image, which, as in many poems, encourages us to reread/reconsider/contextualize-recontextualize all that passed before....
ReplyDeleteAlso, to foreground Hughes' form in this poem, it might be revealing to it in context with Hughes' "I, Too, Sing America."
ReplyDeleteThanks, professor.
ReplyDeleteThis poem struck me because of its candor. When one thinks of death, one rarely thinks of such acceptance, such a lack of fear, almost joy. Sure there are those who are more scared of death than others, and there are those who die satisfied to be surrounded by loved ones, and deeply religious people may not be afraid of death (as much as they are of hell) because they believe that it is not the end of it. But as you noted, the speaker is not necessarily all that religious, (he doesnt see the pearly gates, although he does say he's seen the river Jordan) certainly not the stereotypical black baptist rooted in the south, spewing God's name every other sentence (or at least the women wailing around him might have, stereotypically done so), so whence this courage? Why is he so unusually indifferent to death, and is it at all connected to the culture you noted?
-Abraham