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“The Weary Blues” is characterized by an overall tone of entrancement. This assertion may at first seem odd, considering that the speaker is describing a supremely sorrowful form of music. But despite the sadness channeled in the blues, the speaker feels physically and even spiritually moved by the experience of listening to it. He mentions movement at several points in the poem. For instance, he begins by describing his own embodied experience, as he “rock[ed] back and forth” to the sound of the musician’s “mellow croon” (line 2). Later he notes the movement of the singer himself: “He did a lazy sway. . . . / He did a lazy sway. . . .” (lines 6–7). Everyone in the nightclub, audience and performer alike, moved with the music. Likewise, the very language of the poem could be said to sway to a syncopated beat. Although the individual lines range between two and fourteen syllables in length, most lines have an underlying four-beat rhythm. When heard against this four-beat background, the rhythmic variations in the speaker’s language create a sense of syncopation. In this way, the poem’s rhythm approximates that of the blues, subtly communicating the music’s entrancement.

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