The Weary Blues

Langston Hughes’ “The Weary Blues” is in the form of a free-verse poem. As the term implies, Hughes is free to make the lines as long or as short as he wants and to include as many or as few beats as he pleases. The free verse allows Hughes to capture the musician's “syncopated tune” (Line 1). The uneven line lengths represent the displaced beats and the improvisational rhythm of blues and jazz music.

Yet the poem isn’t as free as it might look. There is something of a predictable rhyme scheme as the longer lines tend to rhyme, and the shorter interjections don’t rhyme. For example, Lines 1 and 2 rhyme. The interjection—“I heard a Negro play” (Line 3)— doesn’t rhyme. Yet the next two longer lines (Lines 4 and 5) do rhyme. There are also rhymes within lines, with “ebony” and “ivory” rhyming in Line 9, and “chords” plus “more” rhyming in Line 24. The rhymes don’t establish a traditional meter—iambic pentameter, for example. However, the diverse rhymes link to the free-flowing meter in blues songs and jazz music due to the stress on