Modern American Poetry

(^404) Anita Patterson
in this lyric he dramatizes how having the blues may undermine a poet’s
belief in the modernist freedom to trope. The stars and moon going out and
the player going to bed illustrate the action of lulling metaphorical language
to the dead sleep of verisimilitude.
In “The Weary Blues” Hughes implies that the conventional blues
idiom is so compelling, and so limited, as to threaten his imaginative
freedom. In addition, the mechanical objects that occupy the poem’s
setting—the gas light, the rickety stool, the piano parts, and so on—evoke
another modern development that imperils artistic freedom. Like many of
his contemporaries, both in the United States and abroad, Hughes was aware
of the cultural crisis caused by mechanization. In 1933 F.R. Leavis, quoting
H.G. Wells, would vividly condemn the “vast and increasing inattention”
resulting from new forms of mechanical reproduction: “The machine ... has
brought about changes in habit and the circumstances of life at a rate for
which we have no parallel....When we consider, for instance, the processes of
mass-production and standardisation in the form represented by the Press, it
becomes obviously of sinister significance that they should be accompanied
by a process of levelling-down.” Two years before Hughes published “The
Weary Blues,” Eliot warned against the insidious effects of gramophones,
motorcars, loudspeakers, and cinemas in which the mind was “lulled by
continuous senseless music and continuous action too rapid ... to act
upon.”^25
Hughes’s concern about the leveling-down effects of technology, which
are barely hinted at in “The Weary Blues,” becomes a point of focus in
“Summer Night,” which first appeared in the December 1925 issue of Crisis.
Like the typist in Eliot’s Waste Land,who paces about her room, her brain
allowing only a “half-formed thought,” and who “smoothes her hair with
automatic hand” as she puts a record on the gramophone, Hughes’s lyric
speaker is left virtually without words once the player piano, the Victrola,
and the other “sounds” of Harlem fall silent in the still night.^26 He can only
toss restlessly, muttering ineffective generalities:
The sounds
Of the Harlem night
Drop one by one into stillness.
The last player-piano is closed.
The last victrola ceases with the
“Jazz-Boy Blues.”
The last crying baby sleeps
And the night becomes