The Weary Blues

"The Weary Blues” is a lyric poem with a jarring but infectious beat. It’s a lyric because it’s short and personal, and its hypnotic, topsy-turvy beat manifests through the intentionally uneven lines. Some lines have as many as 14 syllables, while others contain only a two-word, two-syllable exclamation like, “O Blues!” (Line 11 and 16) or “Sweet Blues!” (Line 14).

The speaker prepares the reader for the striking tone in the first line when the speaker announces that they were listening to a “drowsy syncopated tune” (Line 1). In case the poem's title didn’t make it clear, the diction reinforces the theme of blues music. The poem is about a blues song and has the tone and beat of a blues tune. Since the song is “syncopated”, the beats are off—where the beats are supposed to be strong, they’re weak, and where they’re supposed to be weak, they’re strong. In other words, the poem and the song will have a unique melody.

In Line 2, the musical diction continues. The speaker is “rocking back and forth to a mellow croon” (Line 2) or a soft song. The picture of the rocking speaker is an image since the speaker vividly describes how the song moved them. In Lines 3 and 4, the speaker switches to a more conversational diction. The speaker says, “I heard a Negro play” (Line 3). They then tell where and when: “Down on Lenox Avenue the other night“ (Line 4). The simple, frank wording makes it seem like the speaker is talking to a friend or an acquaintance.

In Line 5, the speaker provides an image of the atmosphere. The venue—the space where the speaker heard the Black person perform—appears as weary as the song. The Black musician performs by “the pale dull pallor of an old gas light” (Line 5). The image of the lighting stresses enervation. This is not a spot bursting with color: It’s a place as worn and exasperated as the musician.

The speaker doubles down on the tiredness of the musician by repeating “He did a lazy sway” in Lines 6 and 7. Due to his weary blues, the speaker doesn’t have a lot of energy. Yet the musician’s dispiritedness doesn’t harm the power of their song, as the performer “made that poor piano moan with melody” (Line 10). This line features multiple literary devices. There’s alliteration with the three words that begin with “m” and the two words that start with “p,” and there’s personification since the speaker attributes human qualities to the piano—it can “moan” like a person.

In Line 12, the speaker presents the musician as “swaying to and fro on his rickety stool.” This image connects the performer to the speaker since they moved to the music too. The image also bolsters the theme of weariness and disrepair since the stool is “rickety” and not in great shape. The speaker sticks with the theme of despair and brokenness when they say the musician “played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool” (Line 13).

Concerning the word “fool”—this might be something of an indirect compliment. A “fool” is someone who doesn’t act wisely or with intention. Thus, the musician is a “musical fool” since the performer doesn’t even have to purposely try that hard to play this powerful, moving tune—they can do it even when they’re feeling sullen and low on energy. Indeed, the song is “coming from a black man’s soul.” Its origins relate not to the intellect but something visceral and intangible, which is why the musician has a “deep song voice” (Line 17).

In the final four lines of Stanza 1, the speaker lets the reader hear parts of the musician’s song. The excerpt from the song features many of the literary devices in the poem. It has rhyme and repetition, since the song repeats, “Ain’t got nobody.” Additionally, the song lyrics bolster the theme of sorrow and sadness because the singer is all alone, frowning, and full of “troubles” (Line 22) that he wants to get rid of.

The diction of the song differs rather significantly from the poem's diction. The song spotlights African American Vernacular English and Southern dialectic with words like “ain’t,” “ma,” “I’s,” and “gwine.” In “The Elusive Langston Hughes” (The New Yorker, 2015), Hilton Als uses this part of the poem as an example of how Hughes tended to “marry down-home Southern locutions with urban rhythms.”

In the first line of Stanza 2, the speaker keeps up the repetition by using “thump” three times (Line 23). The repetition and sound produce an image since the speaker can see the musician's "foot on the floor” (Line 23). Lines 25-29 hand the spotlight back to the musician. These lyrics feature the same rhyme scheme and repetition as the lyrics at the end of Stanza 1—although, in Stanza 2, the repeated lyrics are “got the Weary Blues” and “can’t be satisfied.” Feeling displeased and unfulfilled, the singer wishes they were dead.

As morose as the musician is, he still has the stamina to play his song “far into the night” (Line 31). The performer goes on for so long that the stars and moon “went out” (Line 32) or off to bed. The image of the disappearing stars and moon impact the performer, as, in the next line, the musician “stopped playing and went to bed” (Line 33). In bed, the musician can’t shake the blues: They “echoed through his head” (34). It’s as if these weary blues are haunting the Black musician—they won’t let him be.

Nonetheless, the performer “slept like a rock or a man that’s dead” (Line 35). Thus, the poem ends with a simile, which is a literary device where a poet explicitly compares two seemingly unlike things using a word like “like” or “as.” The simile emphasizes the degree of the man’s pain. His troubles are so intense and all-consuming that they transform him into a rock or a corpse. Filled with such overwhelming worries, the Black musician is stunned, insensate, comatose, and all but dead.