![]() ![]() In the final stanza, the speaker uses a bit of hyperbole to emphatically assert: “In all the earth no joy can be.” A statement that accentuates the fact that the speaker no longer finds joy where they might’ve before. And even as the “robin sings”/”butterflies dance” (two striking images of life), the speaker is unable to shift their mood. The blues skies in the third stanza (as opposed to tempestuous ones that might better reflect the speaker’s mood) underscores the growing incompatibility between the poem’s opposing motifs of grief and happiness. Their disenchantment with the sun (a symbol for warmth and light) and a rose by their door (symbolizing beauty and love) signal all the further ideals that the speaker has lost interest in due to the death of their friend. A hopeful sentiment that’s further contrasted in the second stanza, where Hughes introduces more optimistic images and symbols. In the first stanza, these images deal mainly with light (“mellow light,” “purple blackness,” “paley bright”) and symbolize the endurance of luminance in the night. ‘To a Dead Friend’ uses a number of images to emphasize the dissonance of their grief with the world around them. Creating a despondent cadence that snuffs out the joyful images in the first three stanzas. It’s those final lines that illustrate the speaker’s deep sadness, their discordance with the other lines falling like a dull sigh by the speaker as they remember why they’re depressed in the first place. The rhyme scheme is also crucial to maintaining the poem’s grieving tone: all the lines that express beauty and life rhyme with one another (the first three/two lines of each stanza), but the final line does not. The poem’s rhyme scheme is ‘AAAB’ (stanza one) and ‘AAB’ ( stanzas two through four), with a chain rhyme occurring in the last lines of stanzas one/two and three/four. ‘To a Dead Friend’ is a four-stanza poem written in free verse with no definite meter. ![]() And the final stanza is no less dreary as they confess that such a tragedy has robbed all the joy and happiness from their world. All the world’s abundant joy - from blue skies, singing birds, or butterflies that “dance on rainbow wings” - is not enough to cure the speaker’s intense sadness. Yet, like the “rose” growing beside the speaker’s door, these things do not bring them joy when all they can think about is their lost friend. The first stanza opens with a solemn but beautiful image of sunrise that’s referenced again in the second stanza. Their poignant sorrow stands out in contrast to seemingly everything around them. In ‘To a Dead Friend,‘ the speaker mourns the loss of a dear friend. ‘To a Dead Friend’ by Langston Hughes is a short, emotionally charged poem that addresses the disparity between grief and the indifferent, sometimes painfully cheerful world surrounding it. ![]()
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