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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

“I, too”

The phrase in the title of Hughes’s poem appears twice in the text itself: once each in the first and last lines. In both cases, the speaker makes a claim about his belonging to a society that would otherwise exclude him. The speaker opens the poem with the following words: “I, too, sing America” (line 1). This line alludes to a poem by Walt Whitman titled “I Hear America Singing.” The speaker of Whitman’s poem spotlights a series of skilled laborers whose work formed the bedrock of American society. Nowhere in his poem does Whitman recognize the contributions of African-descended peoples, whose forced labor generated a tremendous proportion of the nation’s wealth. Thus, when the speaker of Hughes’s poem begins by saying, “I, too, sing America,” he’s inserting himself—and other Black people—into Whitman’s otherwise limited vision of American society. The speaker makes a similar point at the end of the poem, where he concludes: “I, too, am America” (line 18). Here, the speaker goes further than he did in the opening line. Whereas his first words emphasized his right to speak about America, his final lines underscore a deeper sense of belonging—both his belonging in America and America’s belonging to him.

Company

Twice in the poem the speaker says the line, “When company comes” (lines 4 and 10). For the speaker, who is a Black servant in a white household, the arrival of company is an event that prompts his exclusion. When the family has dinner amongst themselves, it seems they typically invite the speaker to eat with them. But when company comes over for dinner, the speaker is forced to eat in the kitchen. The white family excludes him from the dinner table to keep up appearances before their neighbors, who presumably expect every household to maintain a strict hierarchy between white and Black people. It’s quite possible that the folks coming over for dinner don’t believe in such a strict racial hierarchy. Even so, the family feels the need to satisfy the expectations held by the dominant group in society. In this way, the motif of “company” in the poem references the perceived social pressures that help maintain power imbalances and prevent the realization of equality.

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