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Trumpet Player Poem Analysis

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1. Scansion and Analysis
The Harlem Renaissance was a period of revolutionary styles of music, dance, and literature that presented the hardships and culture of African Americans. The “Trumpet Player,” by Langston Hughes portrays the theme of the therapeutic effects of music through the development of an African American trumpeter’s music. The free verse poem “Trumpet Player” epitomizes the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz through the unique use of inconsistent rhymed and unrhymed lines mixed with the use of colloquialisms.
Hughes employs the use of sporadic and irregular patterns of rhyme, meter, line length and use of enjambment to represent the Jazz like nature of the trumpet player’s music. Within the five eight-line stanzas and the four line-coda, …show more content…

The gender of the speaker cannot be defined since there are no indications to suggest the speaker’s gender.
The main idea of the poem is the integral part of music in African American culture as a “hypodermic needle / to [the] soul” soothing the weariness and pain from the “smoldering memor[ies]” of “slave ships” (6). In stanza 1, the larger theme of social inequality is addressed through the allusion of the slave trade by trumpet player’s memory “of slave ships / Blazed to the crack of whips,” (6-7). The second stanza uses the imagery of the trumpet player’s “tamed down / patent-leathered” (12-13) hair, to represent the forced “tam[ing] down” of African Americans and their culture.
The third stanza includes two metaphors using alcohol to characterize the jazz music as soothing like “honey” but energetic and forceful because it is “mixed with liquid fire” (19; 20). The music’s energetic and powerful rhythm is characterized by “the rhythm [...] is ecstasy / distilled from old desire–“ (21-24). The concept of social immobility resulting from social inequality is exemplified in the fourth stanza by the disparity between “The Negro[‘s]” “Desire / that is longing for the moon” and the reality that his “moonlight’s but a spotlight,” and the moon a “[moon] of weariness” (1; 25-26;

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