Modern American Poetry

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