One of the twentieth century’s paradigmatic stagings of the volatile comity between poetry and music, Langston Hughes’s 1926 “The Weary Blues” opens like this:
There’s a great deal to be said about the glorious effects of prosody here — about, for instance, the way the utter iambic regularity of those punctuating three-beat lines (I heard a Negro play, He did a lazy sway) have the effect of investing the loose-jointed pentameterish lines that surround them with an undulating, off-beat rhythm: in a word, with syncopation. Yet if Hughes poaches a bit in this metrical way from the singer’s repertoire, he also works to blur the syntactical distinctions between speaker and singer. Look again: the singer is the one down on Lenox Avenue, while the speaker is droning a drowsy syncopated tune, though this does not quite come clear until after the line breaks, when the subjects of...
University of California Press