Modern American Poetry

(Sean Pound) #1
The Poetry of Langston Hughes 415

The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Whose jacket
Has a fineone-button roll,
Does not know
Upon what riff the music slips
Its hypodermic needle
To his soul. (CP,338)

Even as the lyric speaker refers to the uses of metaphor in describing the
“ecstasy / Distilled from old desire” expressed in the trumpet’s rhythm, he
ends up showing us the profound artistic satisfactions and referential range
of metonymy, the depiction of the body’s surface and the temporal and spatial
relatedness of everyday objects in the room. As an expression of weariness,
traces of a personal and collective history of oppression, the “thump, thump,
thump” of “The Weary Blues” is here inscribed on the body as “dark moons
of weariness” beneath the trumpet player’s eyes. The relatively obscure
meaning of the moon going out as an image of thwarted desire and a dream
deferred in “The Weary Blues” is considered and then freely cast off in “The
Trumpet Player” in favor of hybrid tropes that hover somewhere between
metonymy and metaphor:

Desire
That is longing for the moon
Where the moonlight’s but a spotlight
In his eyes,
Desire
That is longing for the sea
Where the sea’s a bar-glass
Sucker size. (CP,338)

Like a held chord, the romantic, sentimental idiom of “longing for the moon”
is sustained and, at the same time, transmuted into a “spotlight / In his eyes.”
As an evocation of desire, the sea is condensed into a “bar-glass, / Sucker size.”
Insofar as Hughes’s later poems mime the improvisatory action of jazz
to discover emancipatory techniques, they are stylistically similar to works
written by the American avant-gardes of the interwar period. In Spring and
All, for example, William Carlos Williams praises the freedoms of
improvisation, while he laments the dangers of incomprehensibility:

Free download pdf