The Blues - Analysis

Making the blues small on purpose

Hughes’s central move is to define the blues through minor disasters, as if the huge, adult word blues can be reached through the smallest, most familiar humiliations. The poem doesn’t start with heartbreak or betrayal; it starts with a snag: shoe strings break while you’re in a hurry. By insisting That’s the blues, Hughes turns an everyday irritation into an emotional category. The claim isn’t that these problems are tragic; it’s that the feeling they trigger—being thwarted at exactly the wrong time—is the same kind of feeling that blossoms into larger sorrow.

Bad timing, and the body’s awkwardness

The details are physical and a little comic: shoelaces snap, a dime slipped through a hole in your pocket. The blues, here, live in the way your own stuff betrays you—your shoes, your pocket—at the moment you need them. That focus on timing (in a hurry) makes the emotion sharper: the blues aren’t just misfortune, they’re misfortune with a clock running. Even the phrase somewhere adds to the feeling: you can’t even locate the loss precisely, which makes it harder to fix and easier to stew in.

From shoelaces to candy: the poem’s quiet turn

There’s a small escalation from inconvenience to deprivation. Losing shoelaces is annoying, but losing the dime means you can’t buy the candy bar you’re already imagining. The poem turns on that tiny denial of pleasure: wanting something simple, reaching for it, and finding an empty hand. The second stanza’s tag—That’s the blues, too, and bad!—leans harder into feeling, as if the speaker admits that what sounded like a joke is also genuinely painful.

A joke that won’t let you off the hook

The tension in the poem is that it treats the blues as both comic and real. The examples are almost childish in scale (shoelaces, a candy bar, a dime), but Hughes keeps repeating the diagnosis: That’s the blues. The repetition does a kind of stubborn work: it refuses to rank suffering by size. Instead, it suggests the blues begin wherever life makes you feel briefly helpless—stuck with broken strings, a hole in your pocket, and no way to get back what just disappeared.