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Assonance

The term assonance (ASS-uh-nense) refers to instances where either identical or similar vowel sounds repeat in a sequence of words. Hughes uses assonance to powerful effect in the poem’s second stanza, where the speaker struggles to put his thoughts in order (lines 16–20):

     It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me
     at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
     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? 

This passage features sustained repetition of two primary vowel sounds: the long E sound (marked in bold text) and the long U sound (marked in un-italicized text). Across the passage’s five lines, the speaker uses both sounds repeatedly, moving back and forth between them in a way that creates a sonic counterpoint. The counterpoint between the long E and U sounds reflects the speaker’s evident confusion about how to identify himself, particularly in relation to his white peers and his white teacher. Hughes amplifies this confusion by aligning the competing vowel sounds with two key words: “me” and “you.” Unable to strictly separate what’s true for “me” and what might be true for “you,” the speaker falls into a jumble of assonant sounds that scramble his thoughts and lead him to his final question: “Me—who?”

Alliteration

Hughes uses alliteration at a key point in “Theme for English B.” Halfway through the second stanza (lines 21–24), the speaker attempts to describe what it is that makes him who he is. He ventures:

     Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
     I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
     I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
     or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach. 

The term alliteration (uh-LIT-ter-AY-shun) refers to a situation when two or more words that are close together begin with the same letter. Hughes uses alliteration in the final line of the passage quoted here, using repeated B sounds to suggest a connection between three words, each of which refers to a different type of music. “Bessie” refers to Bessie Smith, a Black blues singer who rose to fame during the Jazz Age, in the 1920s. The word “bop” refers to a style of jazz music that emerged among Black musicians in the 1940s, during the Second World War. Finally, “Bach” refers to the eighteenth-century German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who remains famous for the music he wrote for cello and keyboard. The speaker enjoys all three types of music, despite their distinct historical and cultural origins. For him, the contemporary sounds of Black musicians are just as important as the classical compositions of a white artist like Bach. In this sense, the alliterative B sounds have an equalizing effect.

Metaphor

In the last third of the poem, the speaker develops a metaphor about the “race” of writing. Specifically, he asks whether a piece of writing takes on the racial identity of its author. This question emerges in the second stanza, as the speaker realizes that his racial identity doesn’t make him fundamentally different from people of other races. He enjoys Johann Sebastian Bach as much as Bessie Smith and bebop, which demonstrates that “being colored doesn’t make me not like / the same things other folks like who are other races” (lines 25–26). With this insight in mind, the speaker asks: “So will my page be colored that I write?” (line 27). He immediately answers: “Being me, it will not be white” (line 28). However, the speaker goes on to suggest that it will not be “colored” in any straightforward way. He insists that his white instructor is “a part of me, as I am a part of [him]. / That’s American” (lines 32–33). In this sense, the speaker’s writing will be neither “white” nor “colored“—it will be a third thing that isn’t strictly about race. That is, it will be “American.”

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