In the poem “Let America Be America Again” Langston Hughes wrote about the promise of an American dream that includes freedom and equality for everyone, eventually. It talks about one day down the road everyone reaching this goal. He does not promise it anytime soon, but as a dream to come in the future. The poem criticizes life in America as being unfair not only to African-Americans, but to poor people and minority groups.

The poem goes into great detail about Americans moving to the new world because they wanted to get away from the “old world” where they were serfs to Kings. That is just like the new immigrants coming to America because they wanted to get away from the life as a surf they created a new class of serfs underneath them, including the poor and African-American groups. The poem talks about blacks and whites building America together but only whites get to reap the benefits. He dreams of a place where everybody is free including the poor man, Indians, Negroes and whites.

There is a quote where he says “America never was America to me” I believe America meant freedom and equality to him and because he has never felt freedom or equality he does not feel like an American. He believes people need to work together to create a place that he can live in harmony with blacks and whites and then it will truly be America for all, not just some.


 

I like this poem because it is pretty straightforward in its meaning. You cannot have a land of the free when not everyone is free. America is only America because we are free so there really is not an America if you are poor or black in the 1930s. There are only two lines I honestly do not understand “Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?” I have no idea what he means by this. I think perhaps people that mumble in the dark are too afraid to face reality and people that draw their veil across the stars are people that tell the world what they think without fear.

In the poem he goes back and forth between not rhyming and then rhyming, I find that very interesting. Seems like when he is rhyming it turns into almost a song. You could hear it when he says”whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain” this sounds like the middle of a sad song to me. This paragraph started with lines that don’t rhyme. I like the transition from rhyming to not from paragraph to paragraph. I also like the stretches where the rhyme doesn’t quite make sense like “the endless plain” that doesn’t quite rhyme with “America again!” I like this because if you stretch a little bit you can make this rhyme if you want to. Or you can read it as if it is a story. I believe he did this on purpose because he must know these two words “plain” and “again” simply don’t rhyme, so I believe he did it for a effect.

I read the entire poem once as if it were a song to the tune of “America the Beautiful” and it almost works as a song.