The HyperTexts

Hart Crane

with an introduction by Michael R. Burch

Harold Hart Crane was born in 1899, on the cusp of the 20th century but with a "toe in the 19th century," as he put it himself, into the affluent but dysfunctional Garrettsville, Ohio family of Clarence and Grace Hart Cane . . .

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love . . .

He often clashed with his father and eventually began using his mother's maiden name as it if were his first. A "highly anxious and volatile child," he began writing poetry as a young teenager and had his first poem published at seventeen. Although he dropped out of high school and never attended college, Crane was a voracious, "omnivorous" reader whose adoring mother showered him with books, including particularly poetry, history and the classics. He soon made it "clear to all his relatives that his favorite Christmas and birthday presents were books." And so from an early age he devoured writers such as Plutarch, Balzac, Voltaire, Heine, Hegel, Whitman, Wilde, Coleridge, Swinburne and Poe, just to name a few, not to mention the complete poetical works of Shelley. From Shakespeare and Marlowe, Crane no doubt learned the blank verse that became his calling card and claim to fame. From Whitman he seems to have appropriated his "mythical synthesis of America." With Melville, perhaps, he shared a love of the sea and its fabulous strangeness. Robert Browning's dark tower with its tolling bell may have inspired or influenced Crane's "The Broken Tower." And Crane read many other poets as well, including French symbolists like Rimbaud. His own poetry has a strong Romantic bent, showing the influence of Blake, Keats and Shelley and also of the American Orphics Whitman, Melville and Poe. Along with Wallace Stevens, Crane is an absolute master of blank verse. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas, Crane is a rhapsode who seems at times intoxicated (if not downright drunk) on hallucinatory language. In my opinion, for whatever it's worth, the only American poets who rival Crane, since Whitman, are Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost. And while Stevens and Frost may exceed Crane in certain aspects of the art and craft of poetry, in terms of sheer ecstatic language, no poet before him or since has ever exceeded Hart Crane . . .

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.

Crane may have written the greatest modern love poem, "Voyages," with lines like those above, and these . . .

—And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Crane's father, a successful candy manufacturer who once held the Life Saver patent, was a highly practical businessman who tried to persuade his son not to pursue a writing career, but Crane's mother had once dreamed to be an opera singer, she adored the arts, and she doted on her precocious, obviously gifted son, perhaps to the point of obsession. Crane, in return, doted on her, while seeming always to be at odds with his father, who was unaware that Crane was having homosexual encounters of some sort by age sixteen. Furthermore, Crane lived in a privileged household where at age seventeen his work was read and perhaps critiqued by Rabindranath Tagore, who had recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature. By the time Crane was a high school junior, one of his poems had been published in The Pagan (whose name is perhaps an interesting synchronicity), a magazine that had published Theodore Dreiser. No, Crane was determined to be a poet. When Crane's father divorced his mother, it seems Crane was ready to make a complete break . . .

My memory I left in a ravine—

Without bothering to complete his high school education, Crane moved to New York City, where he moved from rooming house to rooming house while working an assortment of odd jobs. There, Crane associated with artists, dancers and scholars. He also struck up friendships and corresponded with literati like Allen Tate, Sherwood Anderson and E. E. Cummings. Although he was a "deeply affectionate, deeply loving man," his heavy drinking, instability and vision of himself as a social pariah may have precluded lasting intimate relationships, and his love life seems to have been, for the most part, a series of brief encounters and, perhaps, one night stands . . .

My hands have not touched pleasure since your hands,—
No,—nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell',
And with the day, distance again expands
Voiceless between us, as an uncoiled shell.

Crane was a homosexual "not strictly closeted; an open-hearted and voluble man, with his straight friends he made no secret of his homosexuality, and New York in the 1920s offered ample opportunities for gay life."

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eyes
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower ...
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

According to Thomas Yingling, Crane's generation "stood precisely on that historical threshold when homosexuality began to be articulated as an identity through Western cultures, and Crane's is one of the first literary texts to provide literary representations grounded in that articulation." However, it seems Crane found his homosexuality inimical with the "pursuit of happiness" in the America of his day. He seemed to be either ahead of, or completely out of, his time. He didn't want his father to know that he was gay (to such an extent that his mother seems to have used implied threats of exposure to, as he put it, "blackmail" him into living with her and sharing his inheritance in later, less prosperous, years), and perhaps certain family members never knew . . .

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

Crane read the entire opus of Whitman, prose as well as poetry. He studied Dickinson and read Melville comprehensively. Crane read and admired T. S. Eliot, but felt the need to soar above Eliot's ironic despair through a "mystical synthesis of America" no doubt inspired to some extent by Whitman's earlier one. In his major work, The Bridge, Crane "expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America" . . .

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

Between 1921 and 1923, having moved to Cleveland, and while still in his early twenties, Crane had already written or begun writing some of his greatest poems, including "Voyages" and what would become his book-length poem and masterpiece, The Bridge. Crane was the favorite poet of Tennessee Williams. Robert Lowell named him "the American Shelley." Cummings called him "a born poet." Perhaps Harold Bloom paid Crane the greatest compliment of all when he said, "Something visionary and authentically exalted ended with Hart Crane, which is why he is last poet included in this book [Bloom's anthology The Best Poems of the English Language]. Hart Crane was my first love among the great poets, and like Blake he gave me a lifelong addiction to poetry."

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles out leaping —
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain! ...

But many literary people of Crane's day didn't seem to know what to make of him, including Eugene O'Neil, who struggled to write the forward to his first book, White Buildings, Yvor Winter, and the editor of Poetry, Harriet Monroe. And many still don't know what to make of him today . . .

My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledged once to hope — cleft to despair?

But whatever people thought of Crane the poet, many seemed to remember Crane the man with a "special vividness for the rest of their lives." Stan Loveman, who knew Crane from Cleveland and lived nearby him in Brooklyn, said, "There was never anyone like him, not anyone." Yvor Winters, who first praised Crane as America's finest young poet, then later called his work "seriously flawed," said this of Crane the man: "I would gladly emulate Odysseus, if I could, and go down to the shadows for another hour's conversation with Crane on the subject of poetry." What was it about Hart Crane that made him so mesmerizing to others? Could it have something to do with the quality of a heart able to produce lines like these . . .

Yet love endures, though starving and alone.
A dove's wings cling about my heart each night
With surging gentleness, and the blue stone
Set in the tryst-ring has but worn more bright.

Hart Crane committed suicide at the age of thirty-two by jumping from the deck of the steamship returning him to New York City from Mexico, where he had recently written what Harold Bloom has called his death poem, "The Broken Tower." On board was the woman he intended to marry, and who was probably his first and only heterosexual lover, Peggy Cowley. In Mexico, according to his biographer Clive Fisher, Crane had ogled every "gorgeous Jorge" and yet had also said, "I'm very happy because I have discovered that I am not a homosexual." Then the night before he committed suicide, Crane had propositioned a sailor for sex and had been attacked and beaten. Did he jump, perhaps, because he felt trapped between two equally impossible loves and lifestyles? Or is it possible that Bloom is right, and that Crane was the last major poet in a world suddenly incompatible with, and inhospitable to, major poets? We'll never know the answer to the first question and perhaps the answer to the second question will remain inconclusive for decades or centuries to come. Is there anyone with Hart Crane's talent and vision writing today? If not, can we predict with any degree of accuracy that there never will be? But in any case, today the never-recovered body of Hart Crane, the man who may have written the greatest love poem in the English language, rests at the bottom of the sea he called "cruel" and his poems now comprise a "fabulous shadow" simultaneously obscuring and alluring . . .

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.



North Labrador

A land of leaning ice
Hugged by plaster-grey arches of sky,
Flings itself silently
Into eternity.

'Has no one come here to win you,
Or left you with the faintest blush
Upon your glittering breasts?
Have you no memories, O Darkly Bright?'

Cold-hushed, there is only the shifting moments
That journey toward no Spring—
No birth, no death, no time nor sun
In answer.



The Broken Tower

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day — to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals ... And I, their sexton slave!

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas campaniles with reveilles out leaping —
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain! ...

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledged once to hope — cleft to despair?

The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) — or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?—

And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure ...

And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) — but slip
Of pebbles, — visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eyes
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower ...
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.



To Brooklyn Bridge

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,—

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.



At Melville's Tomb

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.



Royal Palm

Green rustlings, more-than-regal charities
Drift coolly from that tower of whispered light.
Amid the noontide’s blazed asperities
I watched the sun’s most gracious anchorite

Climb up as by communings, year on year
Uneaten of the earth or aught earth holds,
And the gray trunk, that’s elephantine, rear
Its frondings sighing in aetherial folds.

Forever fruitless, and beyond that yield
Of sweat the jungle presses with hot love
And tendril till our deathward breath is sealed—
It grazes the horizons, launched above

Mortality—ascending emerald-bright,
A fountain at salute, a crown in view—
Unshackled, casual of its azured height,
As though it soared suchwise through heaven too.



My Grandma's Love Letters

There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.



Exile

My hands have not touched pleasure since your hands,—
No,—nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell',
And with the day, distance again expands
Voiceless between us, as an uncoiled shell.

Yet love endures, though starving and alone.
A dove's wings cling about my heart each night
With surging gentleness, and the blue stone
Set in the tryst-ring has but worn more bright.



To Emily Dickinson

You who desired so much—in vain to ask—
Yet fed your hunger like an endless task,
Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest—
Achieved that stillness ultimately best,

Being, of all, least sought for: Emily, hear!
O sweet, dead Silencer, most suddenly clear
When singing that Eternity possessed
And plundered momently in every breast;

—Truly no flower yet withers in your hand.
The harvest you descried and understand
Needs more than wit to gather, love to bind.
Some reconcilement of remotest mind—

Leaves Ormus rubyless, and Ophir chill.
Else tears heap all within one clay-cold hill.



Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless,—
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest,—or a child.
Forgetfulness is white,—white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.



Interior

It sheds a shy solemnity,
This lamp in our poor room.
O grey and gold amenity,—
Silence and gentle gloom!

Wide from the world, a stolen hour
We claim, and none may know
How love blooms like a tardy flower
Here in the day's after-glow.

And even should the world break in
With jealous threat and guile,
The world, at last, must bow and win
Our pity and a smile.



Voyages

I

Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.

And in answer to their treble interjections
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;
And could they hear me I would tell them:

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.

II

—And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,—
Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

III

Infinite consanguinity it bears—
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.

And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise,—
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking!
and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,—
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands ...

IV

Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose
I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge
Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings
Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe
Chilled albatross’s white immutability)
No stream of greater love advancing now
Than, singing, this mortality alone
Through clay aflow immortally to you.

All fragrance irrefragably, and claim
Madly meeting logically in this hour
And region that is ours to wreathe again,
Portending eyes and lips and making told
The chancel port and portion of our June—

Shall they not stem and close in our own steps
Bright staves of flowers and quills today as I
Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?

In signature of the incarnate word
The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling
Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown
And widening noon within your breast for gathering
All bright insinuations that my years have caught
For islands where must lead inviolably
Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,—

In this expectant, still exclaim receive
The secret oar and petals of all love.

V

Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,
Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast
Together in one merciless white blade—
The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.

—As if too brittle or too clear to touch!
The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,
Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.
One frozen trackless smile ... What words
Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we

Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword
Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge,
Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved
And changed ... “There’s

Nothing like this in the world,” you say,
Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look
Too, into that godless cleft of sky
Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing.

“—And never to quite understand!” No,
In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed
Nothing so flagless as this piracy.

But now
Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.
Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;
Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.

VI

Where icy and bright dungeons lift
Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,
And ocean rivers, churning, shift
Green borders under stranger skies,

Steadily as a shell secretes
Its beating leagues of monotone,
Or as many waters trough the sun’s
Red kelson past the cape’s wet stone;

O rivers mingling toward the sky
And harbor of the phoenix’ breast—
My eyes pressed black against the prow,
—Thy derelict and blinded guest

Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke,
I cannot claim: let thy waves rear
More savage than the death of kings,
Some splintered garland for the seer.

Beyond siroccos harvesting
The solstice thunders, crept away,
Like a cliff swinging or a sail
Flung into April’s inmost day—

Creation’s blithe and petalled word
To the lounged goddess when she rose
Conceding dialogue with eyes
That smile unsearchable repose—

Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle,
—Unfolded floating dais before
Which rainbows twine continual hair—
Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!

The imaged Word, it is, that holds
Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
It is the unbetrayable reply
Whose accent no farewell can know.



Chaplinesque

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.



Old Song

Thine absence overflows the rose, —
From every petal gleam
Such words as it were vain to close,
Such tears as crowd the dream.

So eyes that mind thee fair and gone,
Bemused at waking, spend
On skies that gild thy remote dawn
More hopes than here attend.

The burden on the rose will fade
Sped in the spectrum's kiss.
But here the thorn in sharpened shade
Weathers all loneliness.



The Mermen

And if
Thy banished trunk be found in our dominions—
—King Lear

Buddhas and engines serve us undersea;
Though why they bide here, only hell that's sacked
Of every blight and ingenuity—
Can solve.

The Cross alone has flown the wave.
But since the Cross sank, much that's warped and cracked
Has followed in its name, has heaped its grave.
Oh—

Gallows and guillotines to hail the sun
And smoking racks for penance when day's done!
No—

Leave us, you idols of Futurity — alone,
Here where we finger moidores of spent grace
And ponder the bright stains that starred His Throne
— This Cross, agleam still with a human face!



O Carib Isle!

The tarantula rattling at the lily's foot
Across the feet of the dead, laid in white sand
Near the coral beach—nor zigzag fiddle crabs
Side-stilting from the path (that shift, subvert
And anagrammatize your name)—No, nothing here
Below the palsy that one eucalyptus lifts
In wrinkled shadows—mourns.

And yet suppose
I count these nacreous frames of tropic death,
Brutal necklaces of shells around each grave
Squared off so carefully. Then

To the white sand I may speak a name, fertile
Albeit in a stranger tongue. Tree names, flower names
Deliberate, gainsay death's brittle crypt. Meanwhile
The wind that knots itself in one great death—
Coils and withdraws. So syllables want breath.

But where is the Captain of this doubloon isle
Without a turnstile? Who but catchword crabs
Patrols the dry groins of the underbrush?
What man, or What
Is Commissioner of mildew throughout the ambushed senses?
His Carib mathematics web the eyes' baked lenses!

Under the poinciana, of a noon or afternoon
Let fiery blossoms clot the light, render my ghost
Sieved upward, white and black along the air
Until it meets the blue's comedian host.

Let not the pilgrim see himself again
For slow evisceration bound like those huge terrapin
Each daybreak on the wharf, their brine-caked eyes;
—Spiked, overturned; such thunder in their strain!
And clenched beaks coughing for the surge again!

Slagged of the hurricane—I, cast within its flow,
Congeal by afternoons here, satin and vacant.
You have given me the shell, Satan,—carbonic amulet
Sere of the sun exploded in the sea.



Afterword

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Hart Crane reminds me of Melville (the subject of the lines above); both poets shared something of the sea's alluring alienness. Crane reminds me of Whitman; they shared similar visions of life's simultaneous unity and diversity. Crane reminds me of Poe; both poets seemed damned and doomed, almost as if their poems became self-fulfilling prophecies. But Hart Crane, like the crew of the Starship Enterprise, managed to go where no man had ever gone before, in terms of language and metaphor. Where Hopkins used language and imagery to startling effect, Crane changed (or perhaps supercharged) the equation to language, imagery and what I might call "sensational metaphor" (i.e., metaphor conveyed through the sounds, sensations and associations of language). Crane's poem "Voyages" is perhaps the height of "sensational metaphor," and it may well be a height that will never again be reached. Or if it is, it will certainly be a sight and a song to behold and hear!

While I have always preferred accessible poetry to the obscure sort (I once complained in verse about "the dark smudge of Greece / the blankest of verse, the obscurest of poems"), it is a tribute to Hart Crane that I love his best poems no matter how much I may fail to completely or largely understand them. I disagree with Yvor Winters: there is nothing "seriously flawed" about the poetry of Hart Crane, because I do "get" most of his poems, at least to the extent that I don't find anything seriously lacking. For instance, let me consider this stanza from "Voyages" . . .

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.

What does this stanza say to me, and how does it make me feel? Well, I can see the "scrolls of silver snowy sentences" (white foam on silver-colored waves) and feel the "sceptered terror" of a sea which can be, simultaneously, both lovely and deadly. I can sense the dangerous ambiguity of the sea whose "demeanors" can motion well or ill, in sessions of alternating, or simultaneous, loveliness and deadliness. I can understand the capacity and ability of the sea to "rend." And I can see the sea rending apart two lovers, so that all that is left of them in the end is an image of their supplicating hands reaching out to each other, for a last parting touch. These reachings are the lovers' "pieties," similar to prayers, and these "pieties" are what the sea cannot control, rend or destroy. Although the lovers are at the mercy of the sea, love itself is not.

Of course this is merely my "interpretation" of the stanza, but I'm quite happy with it. I feel that I not only "get" the stanza, but that I have read superior poetry and have done my part as the reader to validate the poet's mastery of language.

There is not merely imagery and language here ("no ideas but in things"), but something lovely and haunting which goes beyond imagery as descriptions of objects, because what is being conjured here, I believe, is the loveliness and terror within human existence which somehow match the loveliness and terror of the sea. One of my favorite contemporary poets is Tom Merrill; I have complimented him on what I call his "blank power," or ability to "summon the Void." In the stanza above, Hart Crane does something similar, but with a wonderful interplay between the darkness (Void) of the sea and its light, and an echo of both aspects in our own human existence. There is a wonderful pathos to the line "All but the pieties of lovers' hands." Can you see with me the lovers drowning, reaching out for each other even as the sea pulls them apart, first from each other, and then literally pulls them apart themselves? This is the impression I get from the poem. In the middle of perhaps the greatest love poem in the English language, Hart Crane shows us how at the mercy of the elements lovers are. But somehow the pieties of love are not at the mercy of the sea.

While the syntax of the stanza seems hard to grasp, the stanza works almost by magic, as if the poet has cast a spell on the reader, or at least on this reader. Crane's method works well in "Voyages," I believe, because the poem's theme is love and the reader can relax, knowing there's not a lot to "solve." While Crane's language is almost always entrancing, in poems like "The Broken Tower" there are sometimes such confusions of words and images that I wish I understood what is happening better. But even so, I like "The Broken Tower" and the impressions and feelings it stirs. Other than "Voyages," my favorite poem of Crane's is "To Brooklyn Bridge," a truly masterful procession of images cast in rhapsodic language that tell a coherent story: that somehow a bridge reveal's God's design through man's designs and creations, or that man's designs and creations somehow reveal or embody God. Here, Crane seems swept up in a Whitmanesque vision of the unity and diversity of God's, nature's and man's creations. Like Whitman, Crane either sees or postulates new connections, perhaps via a new, Unitarian, mystical religion in which the poet appoints himself prophet-seer. If only he were also a profit-er! Crane led a marginal existence from the day his father divorced his mother and only sporadically provided for his son, the traditionally impoverished poet.

While I don't always understand Crane well, and sometimes almost don't understand him at all, I can't help but fall under the spell of his words. I find myself somewhat bemused to be saying this, because I have always preferred clarity and accessibility in poetry. But when Hart Crane hits the high notes, even if he seems at times to be singing in an alien language, I can't help but be pleased. And isn't that what art is all about? After all, most of us are able to enjoy hearing operas sung in Latin, (or is it Italian)?

Michael R. Burch
Editor, The HyperTexts

The HyperTexts