Clive James, in his wonderful poem “A Heritage of Trumpets,” in this week’s issue, picks up from where he left off in his Poetry Notebook (2014), the last chapter
of which is titled “Trumpets at Sunset.” For James, it seems, the trumpet, when
it’s played “with definition, lyrical and real,” the way, say, Bunk Johnson,
Buddy Bolden, Bill Coleman, and Louis Armstrong played it, evokes the
bittersweet mixture of elation and elegy (“The controlled sensation / Of
vaulting gold that drove a funeral then / Linked death to dancing people, grief
to joy”) that James is feeling as he approaches life’s end (“the dying voice of
silence”). I love that “Blaze away / Into the dark, bugler. Be sure the night / Reflects your song with every point of light” – James’s
inspired variation on Dylan Thomas’s “Do
not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the
light.”
James’s poem contains at least one other allusion, as well – “Play that thing!” – an invocation of Philip Larkin’s great “For Sidney Bechet,” in which Larkin, apparently listening to a recording of Bechet as he writes the poem, gets so caught up in his intense response to it, he suddenly shouts out, “Oh, play that thing!” James’s use of the line allows us to be aware simultaneously of Larkin’s original melody and the new melody based on it, the poetic equivalent of jazz improvisation. Brilliant!
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