(^414) Anita Patterson
irresponsibility toward sense that the poem dramatizes enhances the
meaning: it is a poem of “unrequited passion—‘blues’ in fact.” The
provocatively playful nonsense of “Two live as one / One live as two / Two
live as three” expresses the speaker’s yearning to transform the social
fragmentation of American society and hints at Eliot’s deeper motive for
incorporating Johnson’s lyric. Two poets—one Euro-American, the other
African American—in effect “live as one” in Eliot’s poem and intimately
share a sensibility embodied by the blues. The poem’s outlook is hopeful and
forward-looking: after all, as Eliot has shown, the hope of perpetuating any
given culture lies in the creative action of exchanging ideas and influences
with others.^53
CONCLUSION: JAZZ ANDMODERNREALISM
Many, if not all, of Hughes’s late jazz poems highlight the freedom of
improvisation and formal innovation. In “The Trumpet Player: 57th Street,”
published in 1947, the freedom of choice Hughes himself exercises in
creating a metonymic style opens new expressive possibilities.^54 The lyric
not only educates the reader to hear his writing as trumpetlike, an instrument
with voiced inflection and phrasing. It also dramatically illustrates the
advantages of metonymy:
The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has dark moons of weariness
Beneath his eyes
Where the smoldering memory
Of slave ships
Blazed to the crack of whips
About his thighs.
.....
The music
From the trumpet at his lips
Is honey
Mixed with liquid fire.
The rhythm
From the trumpet at his lips
Is ecstasy
Distilled from old desire—