Modern American Poetry

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: