As I Grew Older and A Western Ballad

As I Grew Older by Langston Hughes is a powerful and moving poem that is full of emotion. Being that Hughes grew up in early 1900s America, the poem offers up a glance of what life was like as an African-American in those days, as he also portrays in other poems such as Mother to Son. Hughes describes his “dream” as being magnificent and “bright like a sun.” At that point in the poem, things take a dark turn as he describes a wall rising up all the way to the sky preventing him from being able to reach his dream (Hughes 40). In this case, it appears as though the wall is actually a metaphor for society and the dark and grim reality most African-Americans faced at the time. Although he had dreams, society and the oppression experienced at the hands of a white-dominated society stood in the way of him ever realizing those dreams. However, after acknowledging this enormous struggle, Hughes makes it clear that he is prepared to fight the dark forces and do whatever he has to do to chase his dream. He describes that he is willing to “break through the wall” in order to find his dream (Hughes 40). In a way, it is as if the poem makes its way full-circle. It starts with Hughes speaking about his grand dream, then the poem moves into the conflict of his dreams being shutdown by bigotry and racism.

The poem comes full-circle by ending with Hughes learning that he must stand up and fight for his dream. The piece uses a lot of light/dark imagery which serves to not only highlight the racial tension that is present, but it also helps to make the descriptions more vivid and powerful to the reader. For example, when his dream seems to shut down in the middle of the poem, he uses words like “shadow”, “black”, and “dark.” However, in the beginning and endpoints of the poem, Hughes uses words like “sun”, “light”, that provide brighter and more positive imagery. Allen Ginsberg’s poem A Western Ballad is one of his earlier poems that seems as though it could be interpreted in numerous different ways. The poem seems to speak of both love and loss, life and death. The poem is very repetitious with the line “When I died, love, when I died” taking up a total of 6 of the poems 15 lines (Ginsberg 21). This repetition offers a sense of musicality to the piece, a trait common among beat movement poets. When mixed with the elements of love and rhyme it most definitely comes off as a rather sweet ballad. Upon first glance, the poem appears to be an ode to a life once-lived, an existence that has come to pass and been replaced by the after-life. Although this poem by Allen Ginsberg is very different from Langston Hughes’ As I Grew Older, the two do share some similarities with one another. Both poems were unconventional and innovative at the time they were written and published.

Although Hughes’ poem deals with a different topic than Ginsberg's poem, they both seem to be speaking from the soul, bursting with what comes across as real and raw emotion. On that note, both poems make use of identity and the more intimate approach of first-person, which serves to add to the deeply personal nature of the work. In addition to these facts, another similarity these two poets share is that they (and their work) were the products of cultural movements that were taking place during their respective times. Langston Hughes came of age during the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s, a movement comprised of a surge of African-American writers, artists, and poets. Alan Ginsberg was one of the most prominent figures of the Beat movement of the 1950s, and his art, as well as his radical social ideas, helped to influence a massive wave of a change in thinking. The work of both Hughes and Ginsberg was revolutionary as far as their innovation and the originality of their work, and as far as the social messages and ideas they were attempting to convey.

Works Cited

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Print.

Hughes, Langston. “As I Grow Older.” The Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publications, 2004. 40. Print.