The ‘bright’ first triumphs of Hart Crane & Wallace Stevens
We will consider here Hart Crane's "Voyages" and Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning," two early modernist masterpieces written within a decade of each other and at the very beginnings of the mature poetic careers or "major phases" of their respective poets.
To get a sense of how each poet is commanding his materials at this formative moment in his career, we will focus on the use of the word “bright” in these poems - a word both poets use in their first stanzas, and conspicuously repeat in crucial developmental moments.
(The full text of "Voyages" can be found here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem-alone/172022
The full text of "Sunday Morning" can be found here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/2464
...though the relevant sections are quoted in full in this article).
Crane’s work is ostensibly a love poem where Stevens’ is a muse poem, Crane being ever uncomfortable admitting a muse and Stevens awkward as always in the realm of the erotic. Where Crane gives us poetry as an image and expression of the love impulse, Stevens parries with love as an image and expression of the poetic impulse. And yet this surface inversion finds both poets approaching the same common topos but from different directions, pitching battle with each other for control of these holy precincts.
Their battlefield is death, over which the poets struggle against each other for the right to erect a great transfiguring trophy: a vision of death as erotic fulfillment, their poems working to civilize thanatos like Aeschylus makes citizens and “goodly spirits” (”Eumenides”) of the avenging Furies.
Stevens gives us the eternally echoing "death is the mother of beauty," where Crane observes that "nothing turns but dead sands flashing" - i.e., there is no poet (author of "turns" or "tropes") but death, who comes to claim all beauty as her own. If death is mother, Crane seems to reply, in this seizure she is surely Medea, and yet in spite of itself death is conquered by death itself, freeing the beautiful Christologically from its entrapment within the accidents of the physical world. And thus death, undoing herself, births beauty it into a sort of Platonic essence attainable even here and now by introspection and insight, and crucially, by the midwife of poetic prophecy of which Crane is principal.
While death serially begets beauty into the physical world for Stevens, beauty is born out of death to transcend the merely physical for Crane, who argues that Stevens' muse in "Sunday Morning" has no choice but to "give her bounty to the dead": the very thing Stevens bids her refuse. In this sense, where Stevens establishes a Heraclitian 1 “A->B->A” figure of life fructified by death and only thence begetting life’s next iteration, Crane gives us the essentially Christian “A->B->A’ (A-prime),” where the life beyond and begotten of death and its bastards, past and future, is not the life that preceded it, but a transcendence of it - transformed by death’s translation (which breaks the spell of its Nietzschean repetition), the fundamental trope Crane places in the arsenal of the mantic poet. 2 Ultimately, as we’ll see, in verse as in all reality, Stevens gives us Heraclitian duality where Crane proposes a gnostic trinity.
Someday, we'll come back to examine the full intertextuality of these two poems and their poets who, for my money, are the best in their language and century (although I suppose Eliot stubbornly obtrudes...what an asshole). But here we will primarily examine the way the two poets handle their materials. And, at this point in their respective careers, the man who died the better poet (though, to be fair, he died more than forty years older) was outpaced by his junior.
Stevens was thirty-six during most of his composition of "Sunday Morning,” while Crane was in his early twenties while writing "Voyages.” At this point Crane certainly was closer to realizing his own central, entirely personal style than Stevens was (although both poems are so eminent as almost totally to define that style for each poet in the popular mind). Even more impressively, Crane has greater control over his materials at this point in his career than Stevens does. That Crane could be thought the poet writing with more "control" at any point in their respective developments might surprise us, given Crane's seeming propensity for prolix verbosity toward stirring up an aural frenzy that echoes the apocalyptic vortex of his imagery. But upon very close reading, Hart, even in all his flurries of multiword adjectives that exuberate like waves over his gunwale in the Caribbean, turns out to be a finer artisan and tactician than sober, fatherly Wally, the insurance executive.
To get a sense of their relative powers at the time of composing these poems, let's look at how the two handle an adjective they both use multiple times in their respective poems, and even repeat in close succession: “bright”. As we'll see Crane's choice and deployment of “bright” is less accidental, more inevitable, let's say, than Stevens'.
For Crane, "bright” always increases the semantic complexity of a lustrous crux (bringing something new and ineliminable to the image), while also landing on the ear as inevitable to the pace and meter. Stevens mostly fails to do the first of these, appearing to give in to the Whitmanian "hum” of “his valvéd voice," surrendering to the ecstasy of the meter in an enthusiasm that Crane shares but masters, channels.3
Crane died at just thirty-two, still close to four years younger than Stevens was when he composed what was probably his first permanent achievement in "Sunday Morning." One can only wonder at the eternal art we lost when Crane fulfilled his own prophecy in "Voyages” by drowning in the Caribbean, having lived not even half the "threescore years and ten" that Dante (with the Old Testament) prescribes a man.
....................................................................................................
Let's turn now to the two occurrences of "bright" in Stevens' "Sunday Morning," quoted as one big excerpt, as they occur in close proximity, much like four of the five instances of the word in "Voyages"; and right at the beginning of the poem, just like the remaining instance in Crane's poem:
I Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm darkens among water-lights. The pungent oranges and [BRIGHT], green wings Seem things in some procession of the dead, Winding across wide water, without sound. The day is like wide water, without sound, Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Over the seas, to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. II What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and [BRIGHT], green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
"Bright, green wings" certainly has savor - Stevens with his impeccable ear proudly repeats it in the next stanza - but what does "bright" bring to the table here other than its stressed monosyllable to the three in a row that slow the stanza to a hypnotic vortex like the glare of Lord’s day noon? Sonically, they interrupt exquisitely - perhaps like a cockatoo spreading its pinions for flight solemnizes, and yet also lightens with a lofty liberty the dreamy, thick, jazzy rhythms of a lazy Sunday patio breakfast, dissipating not only the "holy hush of ancient sacrifice," but also the ennui and existential dread that replaced it in the post-Christian West. Nevertheless, semantically, "bright" brings nothing to the image here that the "green wings," "sunny chair," and "oranges" haven't already established.4
The power of "green freedom" makes the weakness of "bright, green" especially clear. Green is a startling departure from the white one might expect from the plumage of an inconized cockatoo, the white of Emily Dickinson's "Eternity" which we might attribute to the transcendental dreams of Stevens' muse here on the patio, the transcendental aspirations of Christianity to accede to permanence beyond the change, imperfection, death, decay, and complicate sensual obscenity of the physical world. This white is proper to mythology, and the liminal realm of the unconscious and paradigmatic, not the simple natural world (consider the ghastly other-worldliness of "the whiteness of the whale" so viscerally rendered by Melville). Pure white is incredibly rare in nature, always mottled by duns and yellows in animals and thus primarily an abstraction away from the real, much like God and His Heaven to the neo-pagan Stevens.
Wings have been a symbol of this sort of transcendence Stevens abominates at least since the time of the pharaohs - they can translate messengers like biblical angels, the Olympian Hermes or Norse Valkyries beyond the visible into the world of the dead and the precincts of the divine, just as they carry birds over water and through sky.5
But the cockatoo on the rug clearly has its wings clipped, which alone has allowed it to be freed from its cage, just as renouncing the mythic wings of transcendental religion allows the muse her freedom from church as she lounges on a Sunday morning. In their rejection, her relinquished wings free her from the broader cage of an unquenchable yearning for permanence and perfection that seems to result always in a renunciation of the earth, which confinement in a stuffy church on a beautiful Sunday morning epitomizes. This yearning borne in the synecdoche of wings, here forfeit, forms the very core of transcendental religion and its obvious heirs: High Romantic, and especially Transcendentalist, poetry, and modern science - both of which we see this pre-Raphaelite incarnation of Stevens trying half-earnestly to exorcise.6
The bird’s freedom is "green” rather than white, a color of earth, of which Stevens later says "there is not...any old chimera of the grave...that has endured/ As April's green endures." Green of course never endures - "nature's first green is gold" Frost tells us, and "nothing gold can stay." But the green of April is the green of spring, of an endless cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death, the messy Heraclitian flux nullifying Platonic pretensions of eternity, as Stevens would have it.7
Its greenness is also its naivete, its innocence that stands in as stark a contrast with the notion of white innocence as green eternity does with white eternity. This green freedom is new, untested, astonishing, rather than hard-won, forgiven, or absolved; in a sense it is not innocent because it does not acknowledge the possibility of guilt; and it must adolesce organically through the body of the poem rather than avoid the adulteration of a life lived in the world.
Finally, is this "cockatoo upon a rug" possibly not a living bird at all, but rather an image of one, woven into a sort of tapestry? We might suggest this as an alternate reading, as it powerfully renders the sumptuous cloth a sort of neo-pagan icon as sensuously luxurious as it is symbolic, abased to the common floor of a patio, green as the weeds poking through tiles, in contrast to its white-angelic Christian counterparts sanctified and removed from us and our human condition by the height of a dais or altar.
"Green freedom" is a world of meaning that makes the magnitude of Stevens' power in his early "Sunday Morning" apparent. "Bright, green" is a mere cadence which, though aurally beautiful and arresting in its rhythmic context, demonstrates by its semantic vacuity the momentary lapses of a poet still finding his stride.
Let's take a look then at the ways Crane deploys "bright" in his poem, the first occurrence of which he locates right at the beginning just as Stevens does:
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. ..................................................
The semantic complexity of "urchins" which "bright" here modifies is in stark contrast to the point-blank "cockatoo" of "Sunday Morning" (although, to be fair, Stevens was clearly there pursuing a very shocking, blunt, immediate image where Crane wishes to weave a bit at this particular juncture - weave being, as we'll see, an operative metaphor). This density of meaning affords the equal complexity of "bright" here in its friskiness, joy, and quickness of motile intelligence of children during a day at the beach.
Perhaps bright doesn't merely modify "urchins," but "striped" - and bright stripes of clothing are perhaps rather the bright stripes of sunburns, or the marks left by their mutual flaying with sand, or those stripes belonging to the more literal "urchins" of the sea whose brightness betoken danger so often in nature (“the bottom of the sea is cruel” Crane goes on to tell us just two stanzas later), a violence that "bright" will evoke in all five of its occurrences in "Voyages."
In this density we see these "urchins" as children who are fish out of water, so to speak - things temporarily but not finally rejected by the jaws of the surf and that ultimately belong to them (just as "street urchins" are orphans displaced from their home and origins). The lustrous and beautiful, joyous and fun, and deathly foreboding that characterize the imagery of the whole first section of Crane's poem are all packed into just three words in the second line (which is then vitally both expanded and refined by the immediately subsequent "flay" as well).
While we're at it, urchins are carding cylinders as well, tools upon which, between which, mutually, the fabric of a tapestry is woven, much like this poem's fabric and the waves of the swallowing sea will be woven between the two lovers whom these urchins symbolize (the two thus being assimilated to each other and succeeding their duality into trinity, which is a trope worked constantly through the poem, and that we'll examine in detail later on).
The sonic and prosodic effect of "bright" here is no less successful than in Stevens' "Sunday Morning," and yet here it enriches the imagery exponentially, a feat Stevens fails to achieve with the word.
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,— ..................................................
Crane's "Bright staves...and quills" are not only glinting under the Caribbean sun, they are, in their brightness (as opposed to say, murkiness), an Apollonian, lucid fixation (into words and communicable concepts) of Dionysian, vague, animal emotion: a fixation very much like a staff or quill pinning something in place. Staves of the prophet become staves of the composer, and both bring the love Crane feels into effable existence by the metonymy of the quill, i.e., the writing pen. Quills work these "staves of flowers" into words, but staves and quills are themselves violent, sharp shafts like Apollo's arrows. And like the "far-darter" Apollo, they pierce from distance, even with distance, their blinding clarity forged as they are ripped out of Crane's chest and through his mouth into a world no longer completely his own, illuminated and claimed by the sun (a deeply Stevensian theme actually, cf. “it is the sun that shares our works” in “The Man with the Blue Guitar”). They are "bright" intellectually too (thoughtful, brilliant), these flowers and quills, and they pierce us like a surgeon's skill (a word that, at its root, implies incision). Finally, they are born of the poet's loss in "fatal tides," begotten only of death as their primary poet or "maker" - a theme developed in later sections.
The repetition of “bright” here leads us to connect “bright staves” with “bright insinuations” in the next stanza. This is a typical Cranian translation, translating the repetition of Heraclitian or Nietzschean death (as evoked in the literal repetition of words) into a Christological crossing, conversion, or translation beyond death and repetition - this time translating staff into snake. What are these “bright insinuations”? Insinuations are hints - slight, almost imperceptible tunnelings-into and penetrations of meaning into the mind like a snake through crags; but also, etymologically, they are “turns,” the very substance of poetry: they are the bright flowers produced by the “bright staves” and “quills” of Crane’s craft, and in their subtle subterfuge and snakely secretion, they confound the Apollonian brightness attributed to the staves and quills only to share their violence. The implications given his years in the world (which are subtle “insinuations,” prophetic suggestions, Eliot’s “hints followed by guesses”), the yearnings for transcendence beyond death and limitation and the reductionism of a physicalist age become themselves snakes fatefully born of and destined to kill “ananke,” the serpent deity of necessity and ancient synecdoche of Heraclitian death, as it wriggles into Crane’s heart to colonize it. This a trope of death conquered by death, with the snakely turns of Crane’s verse outflanking those of the great poet death, stalking and consuming ananke itself on its own terms.
What do these “bright insinuations” insinuate exactly, pointing beyond and through the simple duality of repetition to some hidden trinity? What is the implication of the dark realizations of death and limitation which beget immediately those yearnings for transcendence beyond death and limitation, yearnings that are translated, illuminated into Crane’s verse? As Crane tells his lover, they point to the "islands” co-indicated by his lover’s eyes8 - an eternity beyond the sea, beyond death, beyond the merely physical which is constantly being done and undone by death in Heraclitian flux - into a redeemed life which Crane consolidates and develops in further sections into the unitary “Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!" ("echo" (that is, answer and hidden third) given to the dual, dichotomous, and linear "oar" (that is, "or," as we shall see)).
“Bind us in time, O seasons clear, and awe” and “sleep, death, desire,/ Close round one instant in one floating flower” Crane intones near the end of section II. With his characteristic translation Crane revisits this previous closure to perfection, this closure to perfect essentiality, and transforms it into a growth, an opening, a life beyond this now salvific, essentializing death.
The “one floating flower,” beautiful in the focus of its death, is now multiplied into shoots of new blooms perabundant and boundless in ambition (“bright staves of flowers and quills today”), chiasmically undoing or temporally reversing the swallowing to singularity of Crane-as-Moses’ staff-snake of the multifarious staff-snakes of the magicians, as well as the literal and metaphorical turning of Crane’s rigid staff into a snake, the serpent ananke it assimilated itself to now being straightened into the staff of prophecy which swallowed it; all as prelude to this new blossoming of manifold “staves of flowers” out of this singularity.
Crane thus shows us this salvation only by means of a Christological trope of translation crucial (so to speak) to much of his verse - the conquering of death by death. And in this case, as often for Crane, this ironic assertion - i.e., the assertion that A and also that not-A, and in fact, A only through its negation in not-A - finds a pivot point in the ambiguous semantics of his diction. “Stem,” in a floral context, surely implies growth and advance, while in its more common verbal aspect it means to “stop up” or “dam.” “Staves” of course brings us “staving off” to present exactly the same ironic dictionally-ambiguous ratio in the following line, when juxtaposed with the primary and nominative floral sense of “staves of flowers”. As we zoom out from the single word to the the whole line here, we see Crane extend this Christological conceit through his characteristic syntactic licentiousness, which yields multiple and sometimes contradictory readings. Consider...
1. “Shall they not stem, and close, in our own steps?” 2. “Shall they not stem and close-in our own steps?” 3. “Shall they not stem and close, in our own steps?”
These steps translate the poet across the surface of the impassable sea, as we saw Stevens’ muse’s “dreaming feet” proceed in the first stanza of “Sunday Morning” in a trope of perfect Christology: an icon of baptism. Baptism itself is a ritual of conquering death by death, after the example of Moses with his mantic staff-snake parting the Red Sea to lead Israel out of its decrepit life of bondage to the serpent of Eden in Egypt, and into a redeemed life in thrall to the staff of Yahweh’s prophets in Canaan. By means of the above three central alternate readings (a trinity of readings if you will) of his pivotal line, Crane asks of these steps over the sea...
1. Will Crane fail (as Eliot’s “fisher king,” who haunted all of Crane’s verse after the publication of “The Waste Land”) to bring a new fertility, by means of the stepping “feet” of his poetic meter, to these flowers cast dead into “fatal tides” back in section II? 2. Will this boundless efflorescence of Crane’s “endlessly elaborating poem” (cf. Stevens’ “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”), his too-fruitful fertility, squander the ultimacy of “one instant in one floating flower” which came at the price of “the vortex of our grave” back in section II? Will his Orphic generation help him merely to evade the death by which alone he might find Life, his steps fixed and “closed-in” fruitlessly by Whitman's “my gab and my loitering”? 3. Or will the dual and self-sufficient sex organs of these “flowers,” alternating as a walker’s feet in steps, stem and close (phallus into vagina), in a temporal process enacted during “one instant” by Crane’s apiary versification, troping on death, turning over the sea, keeping step, “the tally of my soul” as Whitman did “to the song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,/ And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul.”9 Crane’s Whitmanian tally of his steps count here the “counted smile of hours and days” that begins section IV, measure by measure of his verse here measuring out its atomic, holistic truth: counting the total curriculum of the sea of death even beyond the horizon to be the arc not of a self-annihilating Heraclitian circle, but a smile. The tail of the ouroboros ananke is finally removed from its insatiable maw. Life is redeemed from recurrent death by the very witness and register within the poet of all-there-is, by the tally of Crane’s counting soul.
This antiphonal, bipedal progress (a synecdoche of the cycle of death and birth) is no mere ping-pong alternation, though it appears so on the binary grid of the one-dimensional line between caller and responder; just as a spiral staircase seems a fruitless circle when its climber is seen only in abstract from high above rather than from the dasein vantage of the climber himself; just as Christ crossing the sea of death by harrowing hell on Holy Saturday appeared to merely linger in his grave. A Hegelian-synthetic communion begetting the trinitarian dimension known to the actual ascender of the spiral stair, forged by the dualistic interchange of the tally, the engagement, give and take, role-alternation of speaker and listener and artist and artwork, male and female floral organs (with Tiresian androgyny), this total alternation which the dichotomous semantic ambiguity of “to tell” in “as I must first be lost in fatal tides to tell” encapsulates perfectly - “to tell” as in to determine; “to tell” as in to declare - a temporal antiphonal progression from left to right foot fused in the closure of “one instant” into a valence of simultaneous existence, making the vision of prophecy the very act of the speaking of prophecy, the seer Crane’s verse no longer awaiting inspiration and liable to veer from it, but enacting that inspiration in its very pronouncement.
Just as in Christ God became man that man might become God, Crane’s translational Christology elevates the poet into the godhood of the divine muse made flesh and thus made bridge in his lover, and prophetic verse itself is elevated into the future vision it bespeaks. This elevation is transport through the trinitarian dimension, translated from the Heraclitian duality of the antiphon and the bipedal temporal process of walking by alternation of ironic negations of A and not-A (which alternation is the essence of Heraclitian death as seen in e.g., the rhythm of the seasons), by means of time seen as mere stuttering repetition thus allowing its conceptual collapse into the image of a single moment: and death conquered by time, its agent, is death conquered by death.
It is no surprise then that section IV ends with an exhortation for Crane, his lover, and us, to “receive the secret oar and petals of all love” - a crux every bit as densely packed as the “staves of flowers and quills” verse that came two stanzas before. Let’s begin with the lanthanide means of translation across the sea of death, this “secret oar,” the “or” of negative alternation, and the final vision of Crane’s staff-snake-writing-pen through section IV that has become finally both the diligent and linear means across the sea of circular-repetitive death (this line being the trinitarian dimension of growth available to the climber of the spiral stair transcending the circular reptitions which are all that is visible from above or below); and also, undeniably, as “the secret oar...of love,” his phallus.
In these “petals” we see the negative alternation of a lover’s fretting “he loves me, he loves me not” fixed in simultaneous existence along the circle of the flower, and hear evoked perhaps the “pedals” of these salvific “steps” across the sea. Finally, “petals” offer the vaginal counterpart to the “secret oar,” thus completing the atemporal or post-temporal self-contained fruitfulness and simultaneously-existing negative alternates of the androgyny discussed in previous paragraphs, as well as the dual role of poet as speaker and hearer, his phallus flowering in petals of superfluous beauty burst forth from and to encircle this utilitarian oar upon sustaining intercourse dipped into death’s sea and removed and dipped again and removedin negative alternation (much like, again, baptism dips and removes the baptized into and out of the deathly sea three times).
We see the paradoxical irony of physical connection and physical disconnection, of metaphysical communion and metaphysical independence, of in and out enacted by the singular act of coïtus. The vision of the post-temporal simultaneity of this temporal, alternating duality, being a type of unity in its timelessness, sums all here to trinity: this copulation of the poet's tally eventuates in pregnancy and the birth of the poem. This androgyne child is the very unitary, timeless reflection of the parents' interchanging communion taking place through time in this negative alternation of intercourse, a reflection which Crane's visionary verse enacts. It communes with their duplex by reflecting it perfectly in its simultaneous unity. We see then a sort of expanding duality of dualities, the verse-child's relation to the parents (lover and lover, poet and sea) reflecting the very relation between the parents, which is thus made a union instead of a disjunctive dichotomy by the post-facto reflection of the unitary child which transcends time in affording a new trinitarian to what was Heraclitian dichotomy - transcending the dichotomy by which it was begotten, conquering death by death.
Likewise Crane sustains intercourse with the muse and his reader by means of his staff-pen-penis dipped as an oar in the inkwell of the sea, as the erotic act assimilated to poetry becomes thus a trinity instead of a series of dualities, by means of the analogy of “muse : poet :: poet : reader” possible only by the transfer of poetry. The poet catalyzes this analogy in his assumption of two roles that are one of these ironic pairs of negative but complementary alternates: speaker and listener; active and passive; male and female; God and man (himself a bridging Christ and surely God’s WORD, his verbal creation-discoveries connecting the human with the ultimate); which assumption is the very soul of poetry as it translates static disjunctions into steps of dynamic conjunction: a translation that saves the world. Men are conscripted as gods and prophets, mere words and yellowing scrolls body forth the mind of Godthrough Danto’s “transfiguration of the commonplace,” in this transubstantiation of mere material into spirit through the sacrament of art. Finally, the oar and petals are found to be of “all love” (“of all-love” and “of all, love”): the plenum of time and world seen for what it is and affirmed with love from very “stem” to very “close” begets the generative implements and the fruit thereof, present now even in its kernel.
Seen in its entirety and with perfect clarity through the miraculous concentrating lens of Crane’s verse, the fulfilling eschaton becomes enkerneled in every moment of history, collapsing time - “the Kingdom of God is at hand” and “within you” as Christ says. And so the act of art as faithful reception translated by acquiescence into repetition transcends death, even for all of us who become co-chanters and co-listeners with Crane as his faithful readers and thereby the faithful readers and prophets of Reality. This transcendence by translation proceeds as the true vision becomes announced and dictated by the poet (or by us, the re-poets) who is assimilated to the Prime Mover, his antiphonal restatement and “amen” becoming his supernatural “let it be so” commanding history before it takes place. His mind through its vision is become one with the full true self of the universe and the fullness of time in sharing the communion of mirror-like mutality (shared also with us in dialogue with Crane and through him with All Things). Crane’s muse is his bridge or Christ even as his lover becomes his muse and bridge, even as, through his poetry, he becomes Christ-bridge for his lover as his reader, and through their love cast in verse, Crane becomes our Christ and lover as well. In this vortex of “mingling/ Mutual blood” time is no longer a cadence but a dimensional solidity as contained totally in the poetic-prophetic vision: the ironic paradoxes begotten of death that push forward time in a Heraclitian world are now actualized in a single contradictory reality, Crane’s A and not-A co-existing at last, as the sort of object permanence, if you will, of the poetic mind transcends the infantile fort-und-da confusion of all who believe that which dies in any sense is lost.
The key difference between Stevens’ Nietzschean amor fati mantra that “death is the mother of beauty” and this Cranian collapse of time is a rejection of the creed that the dualistic bipedal flux between life and death is everything-there-is and is thus sublime (“the utmost must be good and is” as Stevens puts it). It is replaced by a faith that the dyad of past and present, of life and death, beget now a third, a redeemed future translated from past by our engagement in the present and present itself mystically within that present. Crane thus counters Stevens, proclaiming that all the dualistic flux whose tide we bob in is prelude to “Belle Isle,” that the future is not an iteration of the “eternal recurrence of the same,” not merely more of the present just as the present is merely more of the past, but rather that the past fell into the present whence it may be redeemed by sacrament into a new future. “The good must be utmost and is” Crane seems to chiasmically undo Stevens, imagining, seeing, an eschaton, a telos (glossed later by “Belle Isle”), made true and now through the speaking of his faith. Envisioning a transformation so compelling its future reality is impossible to doubt makes it real and present and transformative even now as that which is to come, which transformation makes it come. Staves of flowers close and stem, and are stemmed and are closed, stemming forth by means of and in their closure begetting new life by ending old life.
"The harbor shoulders to resign" but also, perhaps, to re-sign (a pivot point of dictional ambiguity, once again) the "signature of the incarnate word." Is this shouldering a shrugging of, or an acceptance of burden? Or perhaps both, as the safe haven reluctantly relinquishes the lovers to the dangers of the sea, the "shoulders" now having "to resign" the "incarnate word" of their flesh like a father slipping beneath the waves while his infant child sits on his head. The harbor re-signs, or affirms, and yet resigns with this signature affirming a letter of resignation, the dictional ambiguity bringing the stanza here to mortal swoon; all events transpire even as foreknown in Crane’s prophecy, past is future and vision is reality as all time and the mental and physical are collapsed into each other to consummate their marriage in “the chancel port and portion of our June”; the lover's breast gathers the insinuations the poet's own heart has caught, while the lover's eyes lead rather the poet to these mythic islands enkerneled in the prophecy of those insinuations: all quite "mingling/ Mutual" and ultimate in the merging vortex of death, closing again the “one instant, in one floating flower” after broadening it in growth to a multidimensional plenum courtesy of the Christological death enacted by chiasmic translation or “crossing” (pardon the pun) that deceptively appears (prior to its eventual fulfillment in resurrection which we foreknow only in the yet-to-come vision of Belle Isle) to be mere undoing.
...There is 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, ..................................................
How can an argosy10, a richly-laden transport vessel made of wood, be "bright" exactly? How can it "flash" like the "dead sands" of the previous stanza? It blinds by means of cargo, what it carries, what is not the ship itself, but the treasure it has despoiled or accrued and will bring from one city to another, translating it, so to speak, across the sea. It flashes, though as dead as the "dead sands." Crane's lover's hair brings Crane forbidden, opulent, and stolen wealth, and communicates it to the poet who takes this treasure and makes it into his verse to communicate further to the world.
In his lover's locks he never dreamt a self-sponsored ("flagless," which also of course suggests "unflagging") voracious rapine, a ravening to take and keep and guard treasure, in the blithe and spontaneous curls wandering, turning, down his lover's forehead. It is the rapine of turning death itself in the immediately preceding synecdoche of the flashing sands, death who is all that "turns" here, i.e., who is the only poet (a poet’s fundamental tool is "tropes" which are “turns”), death who is the only one here that can transform, translate, take, and make to be his own, after all is said and done. If he is not the only poet or "maker," he is certainly the last, the re-writer, the editor, the swallower of all the others' bounty. And of course, in the apocalyptic vision first articulated in the second section of "Voyages"...
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.
...it is only the ultimate communion and consummation between the lovers (that death alone can provide) that can translate them, transform them, turn them, into one another, into a synergetic oneness, twined with the Caribbean sea and all their experiences in voyage. The real writing, the righting, of Crane's poetry will be done by death.
Why in seciton V does Crane seem to ignore the great hidden translation enacted in the syntactic and dictional ambiguities of section IV? Because "Belle Isle," the vision whose clarity is precondition of this translation operating upon us, does not emerge until section VI, when isolate beauty itself peaks up out of the waves forever, presenting a quasi-terrestrial, quasi-maritime eternity to the poet and his readers, abolishing every true "farewell" - i.e., every death, and every departure of lover from lover, a separation Crane thus, in his final line, establishes as the true meaning of death, as opposed to the consummating death he laid out earlier in the poem with the "vortex of our grave." Ambiguities obscure the salvific reading of section IV, which is submerged entirely beneath the deathly waves of section V. It is only in section VI to come that IV is re-written, translated by the emergence of Belle Isle, "the imaged Word" as Crane calls it, the poem of the poem. Crane thus makes of his poem a token of the reality it adumbrates, whose eschaton lies in kernel within it, shucked only in the fullness of time by the vision of a future which uncovers the conditions of that future in the present.
"But now" Crane's lover's eyes are already claimed by the waves, his breath is entombed by spirits not his own nor of Crane's poetic power, but proper to the sea as hermetic death, and he must finally "draw in" his head into sleep, which Crane identifies with death in his second section, taking after Whitman and the hermetic tradition in Romantic poetry. This is the pivot-point death, the transitive death of Christ rather than Eliot’s “recurrent end of the unending,” the stuttering Heraclitian end of an endless cycle of death and rebirth which is the pagan death of Stevens’ “Sunday Morning.”
Prior to the emergence of “islands where must lead inviolably blue latitudes and levels of your eyes” over the horizon, the “portending eyes” themselves must close. The vision must die like Christ. These lovers’ eyes which become the very eyes of Crane’s own prophetic vision through his poetic translation in the dual act “to tell” them. And so they are closed in this same Christological death which affords for his verse a Tiresian clarity - “my eyes pressed black against the prow,/ --Thy derelict and blinded guest/ Waiting, afire” - as the words of his verse become the physical bush burning with Divine Presence but unconsumed, an Old Testament prefiguration of Christ, the word of God.
VI Where icy and [BRIGHT] dungeons lift Of swimmers their lost morning eyes, And ocean rivers, churning, shift Green borders under stranger skies,
"Where icy and bright dungeons lift/ Of swimmer's their lost morning eyes" grows the image of these two lines miraculously with each successive word. And "bright dungeons" packs a visual and semantic punch far beyond the delicacy of the words as sound. (Incidentally these words of Crane evoke, for me anyway, Stevens' later "his firm stanzas hang like hives in hell," and yet surpass this with the complex fluidity and synesthetic compaction of dungeons of seawater that lift, heaving as waves, and tie down the aspirant sailors to their mortality yet raise their eyes, their hopes heavenward and toward eternity like Icarus soaring out of the labyrinth; or - as they were closed in Christological death - like Lazarus or Christ himself risen from the grave.
"Bright hair" and "bright dungeons" echo each other but do not merely repeat themselves as does Stevens' "bright, green wings" - the latter, as we saw with “bright staves” and “bright insinuations” earlier, rather translates the former: the act most fundamental to the nature of reality Crane hopes to adumbrate with "Voyages." The frothy crest of his lover is overtaken by the frothy crest of the sea, the former waning in its individuality and hubris against the world of nature, nature which is metonymized by oceanic death ("Draw in your head, alone and too tall here" even as Christ slumps his head and submits to death on the cross) so that the latter can wax in its ownership of the beauty now bereft from the lover, from Crane, and separated logically and essentially from the two into a new and truly trinitarian connecting space between, but more vitally, around and orthogonally through the dichotomy of the lovers, as it renders the line of one mere dimension connecting them into a stereo-solid, spherical cradling world about them and permeating them.
“There is a line you must not cross” the poem’s first section tells the lovers: crossing now seen to be the “chi” of Crane’s chiasmic translations which enact the “cross” of Christ. This space, however, is at this point pure potentiality, a Keatsian “negative capacity” biding its time to bear salvific fruit. Death has overcome life to all appearances; the waves have overcome the lovers; the Heraclitian flux of duality has run its course. “Teteleste estin” or “it is finished” Christ lies with his last words before entering the tomb, or else pronounces in Cranian ironic prophecy as he ironically surrenders to the cross; “sleep the long way home” Crane our Christ offers more straightforwardly as we cross into the final section of “Voyages”.
Just when death's conquest seems permanent Belle Isle emerges from the waves in section VI, cresting the very crest of the sea the way the sea crested both Crane's lover's own crests of hair and Crane's lofty eyes which wreathed those curls to crown. Dry land completes their dark trinity which was pure potential at the end of section V. In this way Crane follows the elegiac pattern of Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which Harold Bloom importantly connects through the agent of the singing hermit-thrush in pine woods and a dark trinity the bird’s song somehow weaves through one-dimensional, linear dialectic with a compassive, “counting” or “tallying” poet registering his song. This always happens as the poet translates himself forward bipedally (as discussed in the “shall they not stem” section above) and with a companion made human by pathetic fallacy (whether the hermit thrush or the sea), the dualities of which are multiplied by this fallaciously humanizing tally, by the very counting of these dualities if you will as a process of counting-them-as, step by step counted into an imaged trinity, an orthogonal extra dimension opening between these dyads yoked by a role-alternating communion of dialectic and dialogue. Just as we saw Crane connecting to his lover, in the last few paragraphs prior to the “crossing” his poem enacted of this connection, Whitman’s final section gives us...
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands, Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul, ... With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird, Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well, For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake, Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
and Eliot’s final section gives us...
If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman —But who is that on the other side of you?
Crane’s devotion to early Eliot, and his conscription of the above portmanteau neologism “wrapt” into section II of “Voyages” strongly link his poem to Whitman’s and Eliot’s elegies, the former triumphant, the latter desperate, into a dark trinity of their own, completed by the transgressive, translational crossing of Crane’s elegy for elegy, threnody for death, paean of the conquest of death by death in “Voyages”.
“Belle Isle” consummates the dark, unnamed trinities of Whitman and Eliot; it provides beauty's transcendent and lively eternity - “creation’s blithe11 and petalled word” as section VI goes on to pronounce - a place of trophy and repose for that treasure Crane's lover's hair carried to Crane's eyes, a place Crane can only see with his "eyes pressed black against the prow," when, "blinded," he finally becomes a "seer." It is in turning away from the physical incarnation of his lover rather than mourning it with impossible desire as Whitman mourns his dead love and Eliot mourns the dead world of Whitman’s enchantment; it is in "dying" if you will to the accidents of beauty (the glimmer of his lover's hair, rather than what it bespeaks) and thence looking inward in Tiresian blindness, beyond the world of appearance into the Platonic world of essences (a journey inward on a Romantic grid though outward beyond the confines of Plato’s infamous “cave’), that Belle Isle can be seen in its eternity cresting the waves, raised beyond the sea and its death.
Death's rape of the lover's locks ultimately undoes death itself in a Christological trope (Crane intones the "incarnate word" and "imaged Word" after all)12, by freeing eternal and essential beauty from the mortal and merely accidental vessel or "argosy" of the lover's physical beauty. This abnegation and chosen remedial death frees Crane’s vision, allowing him to penetrate beyond the physical, through death, into the eternal: like Tiresias, Orpheus, or Christ come out of Hades. Death, as so fretted in the "bright hair" section, indeed turns out to be the ultimate poet or "maker," though in a way finally redeemed.
In four of his uses of "bright," Crane ties the word back to its immediately previous occurrence, and translates it; in the remaining instance, he uses it to tie together in a single image children at play and the alienation of sea creatures destined to return to the surf and the death that Whitman called the "fierce old mother" who "endlessly cries for her castaways" (and of course "urchins" are nothing if not "castaways") - a dual image serving as a sort of atemporal translation, a valence, if you will, in ideogram. Stevens uses the word to make a beautiful cadence that he relishes and repeats, but never develops: a word that adds nothing to the image at hand, beautiful as that image is and would be still without it. Stevens repeats his proud formulation, "bright, green wings," setting "bright" off with a comma from the rest of the phrase for emphasis two separate times - to what purpose exactly other than merely to luxuriate in the “hum of your valvéd voice”?
1.There is a long list of thinkers whose worldviews influence Stevens' neo-pagan outlook, which we are in the course of this essay juxtaposing against Crane's more or less Christian take on history. For brevity's sake, we'll gloss Stevens' approach with Heraclitian paganism and Crane's with Platonic or gnostic Christianity, and omit mention of Lucretius, the Tao, Nietzsche, et al. except where particularly instructive.↩
2. This “translation” stands in stark contrast to the “translation” given primacy by Pound, whose view of its role is more in the pagan, Nietzschean repetition vein of what Stevens is proposing of death in “Sunday Morning”.↩
3. This is probably why, for me, Crane's poem here, despite its absurd semantic difficulties and exotic, even befuddling syntax, was easier to memorize than Stevens' more straightforward work.↩
4. We might entertain “bright” as subtly signifying the “intelligence” of these wings, linking them to the mental and aero-pedal alacrity of Mercury, say, but only very, very secondarily.↩
5. Julian Jaynes’ fascinating classic “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” identifies the sudden advent of winged messengers of the gods in literature and iconography as due to the departure of hallucinated (”seen” and “heard” and “present”) divinities in the wake of a massive cognitive shift in the populations of Mesopotamia and North Africa. No longer able to speak directly to gods (or “gods,” depending on your perspective), transcendence becomes necessary to reach them “in the heavens” whither apparently they have retreated, only thus inventing our original guilt. Jaynes aside, long ago cultures all over the world enshrined the bird and in particular its wings as representative of transcendence, which Stevens knows to his marrow.↩
6. The renunciation of the muse's wings in this sense is a renunciation of renunciation ("he says no to no and yes to yes" as Stevens glosses it in his late "The Auroras of Autumn"). This image a is type of the Cranian Christological trope of "conquering death by death," but for Stevens it saves us from Crane's death into abstraction, symbol, and transcendence. Crane sees this death of the flesh (and death to the flesh) as salvation, and Stevens and his tradition thus as dubiously saving us from salvation. And so the two poets argue over death as crossing vs. death as return, as with Christian resurrection vs. Buddhist reincarnation. The choice then really is between visions of Life rather than Death, each poet's endorsed "death" being defined as the only portal into their endorsed life. Where Crane rejects the life-death flux of a Heraclitian world and embraces a transitive death into a life beyond this life, Stevens embraces life with its necessary recurrent deaths and rejects as mere death without life the transcendental urges of Crane, as they lead to nothing beyond this life (as there simply is nothing beyond this life to the pagan Stevens) and so leading to a fruitless nihilism about the world in the meantime. Ultimately, the two poets agree that poetical man stands before a reality external to him and in large measure inimical to his soul. Stevens gives pride of place to reality, whose terrible sublimity poetical man must behold and come to heartily endorse as his existential triumph; Crane rather asserts as primary the beauty-beholding self that will endure the inimical reality that besets it. We must reconcile the inside to the outside says Stevens, where Crane seeks a way to reconcile the outside to the inside.↩
7. More on these themes available here: http://clamatoes.tumblr.com/post/98705460836/the-prophet-of-no-and-the-priest-of-yes-the↩
8. Eyes - the organs of passive vision - becoming active signals portends (as the "portending eyes and lips" fused in this same section of the poem) the exact ironic ambiguity and co-existent contradictory states of Crane's own poethood and prophethood captured in the semantic ambiguity of "to tell" in "as I/ Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell" (i.e., "to tell" as in passively to determine vs. "to tell" as in actively to declare). More on this in paragraphs to come.↩
9. Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is in many ways the paternal grandfather of "Voyages" (by way of its father, Eliot's "The Waste Land"), as we'll come to see in later paragraphs.↩
10. Though not under the strict purview of our investigation today, relish for a moment the richness of "argosy" here, which brings both "argot," a dense code or riddled communication to be translated, transformed into meaning, and also Jason's "Argo" that sought the Golden Fleece, an empty vessel pursuing a treasure that was itself "bright," transformative hair: hair some critics have argued represented the sun glinting off the sea, and that others have claimed suggested a garment made of precious sea-silk, certainly evoked by Crane in the third section of "Voyages" ("upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn the silken skilled transmemberment of song"). The fleece was hoarded and jealously by a dragon (like the serpent "ananke" or "necessity," that omnipresent synecdoche of death, Crane's rival here), whose mouth the questing Jason (who was about the only mythological hero of Greece who had no immortals in his family tree) was anciently depicted as crawling up out of (precisely as Crane's poem might transcend serpentine death if it can capture the coveted treasure) to take the fleece and return to become the rightful king of his home Iolcos.↩
11. "Blithe" is a cognate of "bright" and here a translation of bright's violence into lovingkindness, much like Christ the "blithe...word" translates Yahweh in the crossing from Old to New Testament.↩
12. This is a translation as “bright insinuations” translated "bright staves," though with a pivoting noun rather than adjectives, something worth examining in a later discussion.↩
