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“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” doesn’t have a straightforward, concrete setting. Instead, the poem is set in something of an abstract geography that moves between different times and places. Perhaps the easiest way to describe this abstract geography would be to say that it encompasses the full history of human civilization. This history begins with the settlement of the so-called “Fertile Crescent” region in the Middle East more than 10,000 years ago. Vital to the settlement of this region were the two rivers that run through it, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the latter of which the speaker mentions in line 4: “I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.” From here, the speaker shifts to Africa, first noting the Congo River, which ran through the Kingdom of Kongo, then mentioning the Nile River, which enabled the flourishing of Ancient Egypt. Finally, the speaker fast-forwards hundreds of years and move thousands of miles to the nineteenth-century United States. There, the Mississippi River provided a symbolic promise of freedom to millions of enslaved Blacks. The speaker’s imagined geography traverses space and time, mapping the great civilizations and routes of migration that have contributed to the development of the collective Black “soul.”

Next section Themes

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