Theme for English B: Meter

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Langston Hughes wrote “Theme for English B” in free verse, which means that the poem doesn’t have a regular meter. Instead, the pace and rhythm of the language shifts from line to line, reflecting the movement of the speaker’s mind. Hughes does occasionally offer the suggestion of regular meter, but these moments of seeming metrical regularity are fleeting. For instance, the first stanza includes a line (line 11) that has a repeating rhythm of iambs (unstressed–stressed) and anapests (unstressed–unstressed–stressed):

The steps | from the hill | lead down | in-to Har- | lem.

Despite the brief pattern displayed here, the subsequent lines revert to metrical irregularity. A little later in the poem, another instance of rhythmic regularity appears, this time slightly more sustained (lines 21–22):

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

Although not metrically identical, these two lines share a similar list structure that’s parallel enough to create a repeating rhythm when read aloud. Once again, however, the subsequent lines devolve back into irregularity.

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Hughes’s use of meter relates to the overall shift in the poem from longer to shorter lines. This shift echoes the speaker’s passage from contemplating his teacher’s prompt to formulating a concrete response to that prompt. In the first two stanzas, the speaker thinks about how to approach his writing assignment. The lines tend to be longer in this section of the poem, and they often mimic the moments of confusion that come when trying to make of something complicated. These lines (lines 18–20) from the second stanza offer a useful example:

I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me—who?

You can almost hear the speaker thinking out loud in these lines, interrupting himself as new thoughts spontaneously emerge. These jumbled thoughts eventually lead the speaker to the question that concludes the second stanza: “So will my page be colored that I write?” (line 27). Immediately after this question, the lines become much shorter. In posing this question, the speaker spurs himself into a new mode, where he begins to formulate a more formal and deliberate response to his teacher’s prompt. Paying careful attention to his language, he works hard to express himself as clearly and concisely as possible.

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