Modern American Poetry

(Sean Pound) #1
The Poetry of Langston Hughes 413

example, “is a poem of adventure, and of nostalgia for the romance of foreign
voyage and exploration; The Yongy-Bongy Boand The Dong with a Luminous
Noseare poems of unrequited passion—‘blues’ in fact. We enjoy the music,
which is of a high order, and we enjoy the feeling of irresponsibility towards
the sense” (PP,21). In “Fragment of an Agon,” part of the unfinished jazz
play Sweeney Agonistes, Eliot illustrates the poetic vitality and beauty of
nonsense. The poem includes the following text, adapted from a popular
song written by the African American poet James Weldon Johnson, called
“Under the Bamboo Tree”:


Under the bamboo
Bamboo bamboo
Under the bamboo tree
Two live as one
One live as two
Two live as three
Under the bam
Under the boo
Under the bamboo tree.

Where the breadfruit fall
And the penguin call
And the sound is the sound of the sea
Under the bam
Under the boo
Under the bamboo tree.

Where the Gauguin maids
In the banyan shades
Wear palmleaf drapery
Under the bam
Under the boo
Under the bamboo tree.^50

That the other personages in the play are ludicrous, materialistic, and
superficial does not suggest that Eliot’s allusion to Johnson’s lyric “imprisons
the song once again in the minstrel tradition” (North, 88).^51 The sense of
adventure and the nostalgia for exotic romance that Eliot identifies in Lear’s
poems are beautifully highlighted in the passage he borrows from Johnson’s
artful rendering of the African American vernacular.^52 The enjoyable

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