Suicide's Note by Langston Hughes

I’ve read my fair share of suicide literature, trust me, I have. Of course, such a statement is generally bound to raise suspicion…but I don’t think my fascination with people who are about to jump off the ledge has anything to do with a personal desire to do the same. On the contrary, I simply find it interesting to see how suicidal speakers are portrayed by their writers. Very rarely does the speaker actually seem crazy (at least, not as far as I can tell). In Jay Asher’s 13 Reasons Why, Hannah Baker – the girl who leaves behind a set of audio tapes for the 13 people who pushed her to commit suicide – arranges her death in a way that would make many wedding planners proud. Hannah thinks so far ahead as to record herself speaking for hours on end, so that these 13 little lovelies will know exactly what prompted her decision to die. She is practical, she is calculated, she is even a little bit robotic.

Now, Ellen Hopkins’ Impulse takes a very different approach. The poetic novel concerns three teenagers whose lives intersect in a psychiatric hospital after each of them attempt suicide. By keeping each attempter alive to explain what pushed him/her to the brink of self-destruction, Hopkins gives a very human angle to suicide. Told from three different perspectives (all in a first-person point of view), Impulse is far more introspective than 13 Reasons Why is. The narrators in Impulse are paradoxically compassionate in their attempts to leave the world – and all its inhabitants – forever.

While flipping through my Perrine's textbook, a poem by the name of "Suicide's Note" stuck out to me. By simply judging the work by its title, I assumed the speaker’s tone would be on one or the other end of the spectrum: calculated and robotic (like Hannah’s in 13 Reasons Why) or heartfelt and emotional (like the trio’s in Impulse). What I found in Langston Hughes’ poem defied either expectation.  

     The calm, 

     Cool face of the river

     Asked me for a kiss. 

By asking the speaker for a kiss, the river is personified as the speaker’s lover. To an extent, this comparison is eerily appropriate. As her lover (let’s assume the speaker is a woman, for simplicity’s sake), the river is requesting the woman to jump into its depths and spend the rest of her life there. Just like two newlyweds - who plan to live the rest of their days together, to die in each other’s company – the girl makes a promise to the river.

Although one would assume that a reference to a lover (inanimate or not) would make the poem more personal, it actually makes the speaker seem less tied to reality. Like Hannah Baker, the speaker in Hughes’ poem sees life differently after whatever experiences have prompted her to kill herself. The personification of the river as the woman’s lover implies that the woman cannot find love or comfort or any form of desire in the real world. The suffocation beneath the “calm, cool face of the river” is the only solace the speaker can find, and it is an apathetic escape from the frenzied emotions of the real world.

What took me by surprise, more than anything else, was how tiny the poem is. In twelve words, the poem sums up the message that takes Hopkins and Asher hundreds of pages to get across: suicide is a hot, complicated mess.