The rivers in this poem symbolize two things. First, they symbolize the lineage with which Hughes identifies as a Black man. He introduces this symbol by comparing the rivers to ancient blood in veins. Blood is generational, and the rivers serve as the cultural blood that is passed down. Even though Hughes cannot trace, with any exactitude, his bloodline to the people who lived along the Euphrates, Nile, or Congo, he is connected to those people and to their great accomplishments. This is important for a man whose society views him as subhuman and seeks to isolate him and rob his soul of hope. By connecting himself with the great river of humanity that came before him, he can draw from the collective strength of his forebears.

The rivers’ second meaning is renewal. Rivers are life-giving. Human beings emerged from the water, and water feeds the agricultural cycle, bringing life to crops and thus to people and civilizations. Water also brings renewed life symbolically in the religious context of baptism, a tradition in which people are spiritually renewed and born again under the flow of water. Hughes reinforces this idea of renewal through the actions he describes being performed with the rivers: The speaker bathes in one, sleeps by one, builds by one.