Forgetting is usually quiet, and the speaker here describes it as a slow draining of the world's colour. "I Had Forgotten Jazz" tells of a stretch of creative and emotional numbness, and of the moment music breaks it. Its central idea is that some things keep us alive without our noticing, and that we only learn this when they return. Jazz here is more than a taste in music. It is the thing that makes the speaker feel like a person and a poet.
The opening image is a paradox: "swimming in a dry sea of / monotony, a forgotten sea." A sea that is dry is a sea that has failed to be a sea, and the speaker is stuck in it, moving without getting anywhere. The next lines show how thoroughly the senses have shut down. Sunlight "ceased to hearken me," breezes are "mere breaths of apathy," and birdsong "didn't hint to me." Nature is still there, but it no longer speaks to him. The poem takes things normally associated with joy and shows them failing to land.
The structure supports this. Each of the first three stanzas ends on the flat refrain "I had forgotten jazz," like a verdict handed down again and again. In the second stanza the language turns restless and clipped: "spinning relentlessly and purposelessly," "Purging my mind of thoughts / Leaving all to naught / Forgot." The near-rhymes of "thoughts," "naught" and "Forgot" make the lines feel like a mind going in circles. The third stanza piles up heavy adjectives, "Cool, damp, muggy, dead fog," then lets "bog" and "log" thud down in rhyme. Nothing in it moves. Even the speaker's effort is a failure: he tries "to spark something from nothing," and a spark has little hope in a damp fog.
The fourth stanza, much longer than the others, is where the poem comes alive. The language shifts toward grace: "a whisper of mercy, a remnant of grace" suggests rescue arriving unasked. Jazz slips in through the radio and "Nudged my elbow and said, / 'Hi.'" That single-word line is the poem's best touch. After all the heavy imagery, the music arrives like a friend tapping you on the shoulder, casual and warm, and the poem briefly becomes funny. Jazz is also personified from the start ("her sweet deep pulsating rhythms"), which makes the forgetting feel like neglecting a relationship. The phrase "the walk of a bass line" borrows from the musical idea of a walking bass, so the sound is described in the way it moves.
The seed metaphor then reverses the first stanza. A "dormant seed" gets what it needs "to split through the earth / And rise to be greeted / By sky, rain, and light." These are the natural gifts the speaker could not feel at the start, and now they return as the conditions for growth. The sea imagery comes back too, as "a passing flow / An ebb below," so the dry sea seems to fill again. The rhymes in this section (needed/greeted, light/flight, wind/again) arrive more freely than in the earlier stanzas, as if the poem were loosening up.
Finally, the lines shrink and speed up: "I remember / I breathe again / I am free again / Now I can dance." The short phrases read like gasps, then like steps. The closing line changes the refrain from "I had forgotten jazz" to "Again I have jazz," a tense change that marks the whole journey from loss to recovery. In a loose reading, the poem's form copies jazz itself: a theme that keeps returning, then a break into improvised, rhyming freedom.
What makes the poem worth reading is how well it captures a feeling that is hard to put into words, the grey, motionless stretch when nothing inspires you. The poem's own existence suggests the cure worked, since the speaker laments "days void of poetry" and then produces some. Anyone who has lost interest in something they love, and then rediscovered it by accident, will recognise that "Hi" from the radio.