Tired

Langston Hughes’s lyric poem “Tired” begins with two literary devices: repetition and hyperbole. The speaker isn’t “kind of tired” or “somewhat tired”—the speaker repeats the title in the first line to emphasize that he is “so tired of waiting.” The speaker is intentionally not presenting a moderate opinion, nor is the speaker open to a different take. In Line 2, the speaker brings in the reader or the person listening to the poem: “Aren’t you”? asks the speaker. With the second-person pronoun “you,” the speaker ushers the audience into his world, asking whether the audience agrees with him. Next, the speaker reveals the somewhat abstract idea that has exhausted him: He is so tired of waiting for “the world to become good / And beautiful and kind” (Lines 3-4). These lines provide some clarity, but they also lead to additional questions. A reader might wonder what the speaker means by “good,” “beautiful,” and “kind.”

In The Big Sea, Langston Hughes discusses his summer vacations during high school. He would read books by Friedrich Nietzsche and other authors until he fell asleep each night. The 19th-century German philosopher Nietzsche famously argued that good and evil were constructs, with “good” merely being whatever the dominant group at the time said was good.