Epigraph
Ce ne peut être que la fin du monde, en avançant.
---RIMBAUD
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: LEGEND [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 As silent as a mirror is believed
2 Realities plunge in silence by ...
3 I am not ready for repentance;
4 Nor to match regrets. For the moth
5 Bends no more than the still
6 Imploring flame. And tremorous
7 In the white falling flakes
8 Kisses are,---
9 The only worth all granting.
10 It is to be learned---
11 This cleaving and this burning,
12 But only by the one who
13 Spends out himself again.
14 Twice and twice
15 (Again the smoking souvenir,
16 Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again.
17 Until the bright logic is won
18 Unwhispering as a mirror
19 Is believed.
20 Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry
21 Shall string some constant harmony,---
22 Relentless caper for all those who step
23 The legend of their youth into the noon.
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: BLACK TAMBOURINE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 The interests of a black man in a cellar
2 Mark tardy judgment on the world\'s closed door.
3 Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle,
4 And a roach spans a crevice in the floor.
5 Aesop, driven to pondering, found
6 Heaven with the tortoise and the hare;
7 Fox brush and sow ear top his grave
8 And mingling incantations on the air.
9 The black man, forlorn in the cellar,
10 Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark, that lies,
11 Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall,
12 And, in Africa, a carcass quick with flies.
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: EMBLEMS OF CONDUCT [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 By a peninsula the wanderer sat and sketched
2 The uneven valley graves. While the apostle gave
3 Alms to the meek the volcano burst
4 With sulphur and aureate rocks ...
5 For joy rides in stupendous coverings
6 Luring the living into spiritual gates.
7 Orators follow the universe
8 And radio the complete laws to the people.
9 The apostle conveys thought through discipline.
10 Bowls and cups fill historians with adorations,---
11 Dull lips commemorating spiritual gates.
12 The wanderer later chose this spot of rest
13 Where marble clouds support the sea
14 And where was finally home a chosen hero.
15 By that time summer and smoke were past.
16 Dolphins still played, arching the horizons,
17 But only to build memories of spiritual gates.
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: MY GRANDMOTHER\'S LOVE LETTERS [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 There are no stars tonight
2 But those of memory.
3 Yet how much room for memory there is
4 In the loose girdle of soft rain.
`
5 There is even room enough
6 For the letters of my mother\'s mother,
7 Elizabeth,
8 That have been pressed so long
9 Into a corner of the roof
10 That they are brown and soft,
11 And liable to melt as snow.
12 Over the greatness of such space
13 Steps must be gentle.
14 It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
15 It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.
16 And I ask myself:
17 "Are your fingers long enough to play
18 Old keys that are but echoes:
19 Is the silence strong enough
20 To carry back the music to its source
21 And back to you again
22 As though to her?"
23 Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
24 Through much of what she would not understand;
25 And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
26 With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: SUNDAY MORNING APPLES [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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To William Sommer
1 The leaves will fall again sometime and fill
2 The fleece of nature with those purposes
3 That are your rich and faithful strength of line.
4 But now there are challenges to spring
5 In that ripe nude with head
6 reared
7 Into a realm of swords, her purple shadow
8 Bursting on the winter of the world
9 From whiteness that cries defiance to the snow.
10 A boy runs with a dog before the sun, straddling
11 Spontaneities that form their independent orbits,
12 Their own perennials of light
13 In the valley where you live
14 (called Brandywine).
15 I have seen the apples there that toss you secrets,---
16 Beloved apples of seasonable madness
17 That feed your inquiries with aerial wine.
18 Put them again beside a pitcher with a knife,
19 And poise them full and ready for explosion---
20 The apples, Bill, the apples!
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: PRAISE FOR AN URN [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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In Memoriam: Ernest Nelson
1 It was a kind and northern face
2 That mingled in such exile guise
3 The everlasting eyes of Pierrot
4 And, of Gargantua, the laughter.
5 His thoughts, delivered to me
6 From the white coverlet and pillow,
7 I see now, were inheritances---
8 Delicate riders of the storm.
9 The slant moon on the slanting hill
10 Once moved us toward presentiments
11 Of what the dead keep, living still,
12 And such assessments of the soul
13 As, perched in the crematory lobby,
14 The insistent clock commented on,
15 Touching as well upon our praise
16 Of glories proper to the time.
17 Still, having in mind gold hair,
18 I cannot see that broken brow
19 And miss the dry sound of bees
20 Stretching across a lucid space.
21 Scatter these well-meant idioms
22 Into the smoky spring that fills
23 The suburbs, where they will be lost.
24 They are no trophies of the sun.
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: GARDEN ABSTRACT [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 The apple on its bough is her desire,---
2 Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
3 The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
4 Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
5 Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
6 She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.
7 And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
8 The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
9 Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
10 Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
11 She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
12 Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: STARK MAJOR [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 The lover\'s death, how regular
2 With lifting spring and starker
3 Vestiges of the sun that somehow
4 Filter in to us before we waken.
5 Not yet is there that heat and sober
6 Vivisection of more clamant air
7 That hands joined in the dark will answer
8 After the daily circuits of its glare.
9 It is the time of sundering ...
10 Beneath the green silk counterpane
11 Her mound of undelivered life
12 Lies cool upon her---not yet pain.
13 And she will wake before you pass,
14 Scarcely aloud, beyond her door,
15 And every third step down the stair
16 Until you reach the muffled floor---
17 Will laugh and call your name; while you,
18 Still answering her faint good-byes,
19 Will find the street, only to look
20 At doors and stone with broken eyes.
21 Walk now, and note the lover\'s death.
22 Henceforth her memory is more
23 Than yours, in cries, in ecstasies
24 You cannot ever reach to share.
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: CHAPLINESQUE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 We make our meek adjustments,
2 Contented with such random consolations
3 As the wind deposits
4 In slithered and too ample pockets.
5 For we can still love the world, who find
6 A famished kitten on the step, and know
7 Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
8 Or warm torn elbow coverts.
9 We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
10 Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
11 That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
12 Facing the dull squint with what innocence
13 And what surprise!
14 And yet these fine collapses are not lies
15 More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
16 Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
17 We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
18 What blame to us if the heart live on.
19 The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
20 The moon in lonely alleys make
21 A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
22 And through all sound of gaiety and quest
23 Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: PASTORALE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 No more violets,
2 And the year
3 Broken into smoky panels.
4 What woods remember now
5 Her calls, her enthusiasms.
6 That ritual of sap and leaves
7 The sun drew out,
8 Ends in this latter muffled
9 Bronze and brass. The wind
10 Takes rein.
11 If, dusty, I bear
12 An image beyond this
13 Already fallen harvest,
14 I can only query, "Fool---
15 Have you remembered too long;
16 Or was there too little said
17 For ease or resolution---
18 Summer scarcely begun
19 And violets,
20 A few picked, the rest dead?"
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: IN SHADOW [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Out in the late amber afternoon,
2 Confused among chrysanthemums,
3 Her parasol, a pale balloon,
4 Like a waiting moon, in shadow swims.
5 Her furtive lace and misty hair
6 Over the garden dial distill
7 The sunlight,---then withdrawing, wear
8 Again the shadows at her will.
9 Gently yet suddenly, the sheen
10 Of stars inwraps her parasol.
11 She hears my step behind the green
12 Twilight, stiller than shadows, fall.
13 "Come, it is too late,---too late
14 To risk alone the light\'s decline:
15 Nor has the evening long to wait,"---
16 But her own words are night\'s and mine.
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE FERNERY [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 The lights that travel on her spectacles
2 Seldom, now, meet a mirror in her eyes.
3 But turning, as you may chance to lift a shade
4 Beside her and her fernery, is to follow
5 The zigzags fast around dry lips composed
6 To darkness through a wreath of sudden pain.
7 ---So, while fresh sunlight splinters humid green
8 I have known myself a nephew to confusions
9 That sometimes take up residence and reign
10 In crowns less grey---O merciless tidy hair!作者: 王敖 时间: 2007-8-4 13:22
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: NORTH LABRADOR [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 A land of leaning ice
2 Hugged by plaster-grey arches of sky,
3 Flings itself silently
4 Into eternity.
5 "Has no one come here to win you,
6 Or left you with the faintest blush
7 Upon your glittering breasts?
8 Have you no memories, O Darkly Bright?"
9 Cold-hushed, there is only the shifting of moments
10 That journey toward no Spring---
11 No birth, no death, no time nor sun
12 In answer.
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: REPOSE OF RIVERS [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 The willows carried a slow sound,
2 A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.
3 I could never remember
4 That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
5 Till age had brought me to the sea.
6 Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves
7 Where cypresses shared the noon\'s
8 Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.
9 And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams
10 Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them
11 Asunder ...
12 How much I would have bartered! the black gorge
13 And all the singular nestings in the hills
14 Where beavers learn stitch and tooth.
15 The pond I entered once and quickly fled---
16 I remember now its singing willow rim.
17 And finally, in that memory all things nurse;
18 After the city that I finally passed
19 With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts
20 The monsoon cut across the delta
21 At gulf gates ... There, beyond the dykes
22 I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer,
23 And willows could not hold more steady sound.
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: PARAPHRASE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Of a steady winking beat between
2 Systole, diastole spokes-of-a-wheel
3 One rushing from the bed at night
4 May find the record wedged in his soul.
5 Above the feet the clever sheets
6 Lie guard upon the integers of life:
7 For what skims in between uncurls the toe,
8 Involves the hands in purposeless repose.
9 But from its bracket how can the tongue tell
10 When systematic morn shall sometime flood
11 The pillow---how desperate is the light
12 That shall not rouse, how faint the crow\'s cavil
13 As, when stunned in that antarctic blaze,
14 Your head, unrocking to a pulse, already
15 Hollowed by air, posts a white paraphrase
16 Among bruised roses on the papered wall.
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: POSSESSIONS [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Witness now this trust! the rain
2 That steals softly direction
3 And the key, ready to hand---sifting
4 One moment in sacrifice (the direst)
5 Through a thousand nights the flesh
6 Assaults outright for bolts that linger
7 Hidden,---O undirected as the sky
8 That through its black foam has no eyes
9 For this fixed stone of lust ...
10 Accumulate such moments to an hour:
11 Account the total of this trembling tabulation.
12 I know the screen, the distant flying taps
13 And stabbing medley that sways---
14 And the mercy, feminine, that stays
15 As though prepared.
16 And I, entering, take up the stone
17 As quiet as you can make a man ...
18 In Bleecker Street, still trenchant in a void,
19 Wounded by apprehensions out of speech,
20 I hold it up against a disk of light---
21 I, turning, turning on smoked forking spires,
22 The city\'s stubborn lives, desires.
23 Tossed on these horns, who bleeding dies,
24 Lacks all but piteous admissions to be spilt
25 Upon the page whose blind sum finally burns
26 Record of rage and partial appetites.
27 The pure possession, the inclusive cloud
28 Whose heart is fire shall come,---the white wind rase
29 All but bright stones wherein our smiling plays.
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Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: LACHRYMAE CHRISTI [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Whitely, while Benzine
2 Rinsings from the moon
3 Dissolve all but the windows of the mills
4 (Inside the sure machinery
5 Is still
6 And curdled only where a sill
7 Sluices its one unyielding smile)
8 Immaculate venom binds
9 The fox\'s teeth, and swart
10 Thorns freshen on the year\'s
11 First blood. From flanks unfended,
12 Twanged red perfidies of spring
13 Are trillion on the hill.
14 And the nights opening
15 Chant pyramids,---
16 Anoint with innocence,---recall
17 To music and retrieve what perjuries
18 Had galvanized the eyes.
19 While chime
20 Beneath and all around
21 Distilling clemencies,---worms\'
22 Inaudible whistle, tunneling
23 Not penitence
24 But song, as these
25 Perpetual fountains, vines,---
26 Thy Nazarene and tinder eyes.
27 (Let sphinxes from the ripe
28 Borage of death have cleared my tongue
29 Once and again; vermin and rod
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30 No longer bind. Some sentient cloud
31 Of tears flocks through the tendoned loam:
32 Betrayed stones slowly speak.)
33 Names peeling from Thine eyes
34 And their undimming lattices of flame,
35 Spell out in palm and pain
36 Compulsion of the year, O Nazarene.
37 Lean long from sable, slender boughs,
38 Unstanched and luminous. And as the nights
39 Strike from Thee perfect spheres,
40 Lift up in lilac-emerald breath the grail
41 Of earth again---
42 Thy face
43 From charred and riven stakes, O
44 Dionysus, Thy
45 Unmangled target smile.
[Page 21 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: PASSAGE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
2 I heard the sea.
3 In sapphire arenas of the hills
4 I was promised an improved infancy.
5 Sulking, sanctioning the sun,
6 My memory I left in a ravine,---
7 Casual louse that tissues the buckwheat,
8 Aprons rocks, congregates pears
9 In moonlit bushels
10 And wakens alleys with a hidden cough.
11 Dangerously the summer burned
12 (I had joined the entrainments of the wind).
13 The shadows of boulders lengthened my back:
14 In the bronze gongs of my cheeks
15 The rain dried without odour.
16 "It is not long, it is not long;
17 See where the red and black
18 Vine-stanchioned valleys---": but the wind
19 Died speaking through the ages that you know
20 And hug, chimney-sooted heart of man!
21 So was I turned about and back, much as your smoke
22 Compiles a too well known biography.
23 The evening was a spear in the ravine
24 That throve through very oak. And had I walked
25 The dozen particular decimals of time?
26 Touching an opening laurel, I found
27 A thief beneath, my stolen book in hand.
28 "Why are you back here---smiling an iron coffin?"
29 "To argue with the laurel," I replied:
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30 "Am justified in transience, fleeing
31 Under the constant wonder of your eyes---."
32 He closed the book. And from the Ptolemies
33 Sand troughed us in a glittering abyss.
34 A serpent swam a vertex to the sun
35 ---On unpaced beaches leaned its tongue and drummed.
36 What fountains did I hear? what icy speeches?
37 Memory, committed to the page, had broke.
[Page 23 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE WINE MENAGERIE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Invariably when wine redeems the sight,
2 Narrowing the mustard scansions of the eyes,
3 A leopard ranging always in the brow
4 Asserts a vision in the slumbering gaze.
5 Then glozening decanters that reflect the street
6 Wear me in crescents on their bellies. Slow
7 Applause flows into liquid cynosures:
8 ---I am conscripted to their shadows\' glow.
9 Against the imitation onyx wainscoting
10 (Painted emulsion of snow, eggs, yarn, coal, manure)
11 Regard the forceps of the smile that takes her.
12 Percussive sweat is spreading to his hair. Mallets,
13 Her eyes, unmake an instant of the world ...
14 What is it in this heap the serpent pries---
15 Whose skin, facsimile of time, unskeins
16 Octagon, sapphire transepts round the eyes;
17 ---From whom some whispered carillon assures
18 Speed to the arrow into feathered skies?
19 Sharp to the windowpane guile drags a face,
20 And as the alcove of her jealousy recedes
21 An urchin who has left the snow
22 Nudges a cannister across the bar
23 While August meadows somewhere clasp his brow.
24 Each chamber, transept, coins some squint,
25 Remorseless line, minting their separate wills---
26 Poor streaked bodies wreathing up and out,
27 Unwitting the stigma that each turn repeals:
28 Between black tusks the roses shine!
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29 New thresholds, new anatomies! Wine talons
30 Build freedom up about me and distill
31 This competence---to travel in a tear
32 Sparkling alone, within another\'s will.
33 Until my blood dreams a receptive smile
34 Wherein new purities are snared; where chimes
35 Before some flame of gaunt repose a shell
36 Tolled once, perhaps, by every tongue in hell.
37 ---Anguished, the wit that cries out of me:
38 "Alas,---these frozen billows of your skill!
39 Invent new dominoes of love and bile ...
40 Ruddy, the tooth implicit of the world
41 Has followed you. Though in the end you know
42 And count some dim inheritance of sand,
43 How much yet meets the treason of the snow.
44 "Rise from the dates and crumbs. And walk away,
45 Stepping over Holofernes\' shins---
46 Beyond the wall, whose severed head floats by
47 With Baptist John\'s. Their whispering begins.
48 "---And fold your exile on your back again;
49 Petrushka\'s valentine pivots on its pin."
1 Regard the capture here, O Janus-faced,
2 As double as the hands that twist this glass.
3 Such eyes at search or rest you cannot see;
4 Reciting pain or glee, how can you bear!
5 Twin shadowed halves: the breaking second holds
6 In each the skin alone, and so it is
7 I crust a plate of vibrant mercury
8 Borne cleft to you, and brother in the half.
9 Inquire this much-exacting fragment smile,
10 Its drums and darkest blowing leaves ignore,---
11 Defer though, revocation of the tears
12 That yield attendance to one crucial sign.
13 Look steadily---how the wind feasts and spins
14 The brain\'s disk shivered against lust. Then watch
15 While darkness, like an ape\'s face, falls away,
16 And gradually white buildings answer day.
17 Let the same nameless gulf beleaguer us---
18 Alike suspend us from atrocious sums
19 Built floor by floor on shafts of steel that grant
20 The plummet heart, like Absalom, no stream.
21 The highest tower,---let her ribs palisade
22 Wrenched gold of Nineveh;---yet leave the tower.
23 The bridge swings over salvage, beyond wharves;
24 A wind abides the ensign of your will ...
25 In alternating bells have you not heard
26 All hours clapped dense into a single stride?
27 Forgive me for an echo of these things,
28 And let us walk through time with equal pride.
[Page 26 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: FOR THE MARRIAGE OF FAUSTUS AND HELEN [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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"And so we may arrive by Talmud skill
And profane Greek to raise the building up
Of Helen\'s house against the Ismaelite,
King of Thogarma, and his habergeons
Brimstony, blue and fiery; and the force
Of King Abaddon, and the beast of Cittim;
Which Rabbi David Kimchi, Onkelos,
And Aben Ezra do interpret Rome."
---THE ALCHEMIST.
I
1 The mind has shown itself at times
2 Too much the baked and labeled dough
3 Divided by accepted multitudes.
4 Across the stacked partitions of the day---
5 Across the memoranda, baseball scores,
6 The stenographic smiles and stock quotations
7 Smutty wings flash out equivocations.
8 The mind is brushed by sparrow wings;
9 Numbers, rebuffed by asphalt, crowd
10 The margins of the day, accent the curbs,
11 Convoying divers dawns on every corner
12 To druggist, barber and tobacconist,
13 Until the graduate opacities of evening
14 Take them away as suddenly to somewhere
15 Virginal perhaps, less fragmentary, cool.
16 There is the world dimensional for
17 those untwisted by the love of things
18 irreconcilable ...
19 And yet, suppose some evening I forgot
20 The fare and transfer, yet got by that way
21 Without recall,---lost yet poised in traffic.
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22 Then I might find your eyes across an aisle,
23 Still flickering with those prefigurations---
24 Prodigal, yet uncontested now,
25 25 Half-riant before the jerky window frame.
26 There is some way, I think, to touch
27 Those hands of yours that count the nights
28 Stippled with pink and green advertisements.
29 And now, before its arteries turn dark
30 I would have you meet this bartered blood.
31 Imminent in his dream, none better knows
32 The white wafer cheek of love, or offers words
33 Lightly as moonlight on the eaves meets snow.
34 Reflective conversion of all things
35 At your deep blush, when ecstasies thread
36 The limbs and belly, when rainbows spread
37 Impinging on the throat and sides ...
38 Inevitable, the body of the world
39 Weeps in inventive dust for the hiatus
40 That winks above it, bluet in your breasts.
41 The earth may glide diaphanous to death;
42 But if I lift my arms it is to bend
43 To you who turned away once, Helen, knowing
44 The press of troubled hands, too alternate
45 With steel and soil to hold you endlessly.
46 I meet you, therefore, in that eventual flame
47 You found in final chains, no captive then---
48 Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes;
49 White, through white cities passed on to assume
50 That world which comes to each of us alone.
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51 Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane,
52 Bent axle of devotion along companion ways
53 That beat, continuous, to hourless days---
54 One inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.
[Page 29 ]
II
55 Brazen hypnotics glitter here;
56 Glee shifts from foot to foot,
57 Magnetic to their tremulo.
58 This crashing opra bouffe,
59 Blest excursion! this ricochet
60 From roof to roof---
61 Know, Olympians, we are breathless
62 While nigger cupids scour the stars!
63 A thousand light shrugs balance us
64 Through snarling hails of melody.
65 White shadows slip across the floor
66 Splayed like cards from a loose hand;
67 Rhythmic ellipses lead into canters
68 Until somewhere a rooster banters.
69 Greet naïvely---yet intrepidly
70 New soothings, new amazements
71 That cornets introduce at every turn---
72 And you may fall downstairs with me
73 With perfect grace and equanimity.
74 Or, plaintively scud past shores
75 Where, by strange harmonic laws
76 All relatives, serene and cool,
77 Sit rocked in patent armchairs.
78 O, I have known metallic paradises
79 Where cuckoos clucked to finches
80 Above the deft catastrophes of drums.
81 While titters hailed the groans of death
82 Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen
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83 The incunabula of the divine grotesque.
84 This music has a reassuring way.
85 The siren of the springs of guilty song---
86 Let us take her on the incandescent wax
87 Striated with nuances, nervosities
88 That we are heir to: she is still so young,
89 We cannot frown upon her as she smiles,
90 Dipping here in this cultivated storm
91 Among slim skaters of the gardened skies.
[Page 31 ]
III
92 Capped arbiter of beauty in this street
93 That narrows darkly into motor dawn,---
94 You, here beside me, delicate ambassador
95 Of intricate slain numbers that arise
96 In whispers, naked of steel;
97 religious gunman!
98 Who faithfully, yourself, will fall too soon,
99 And in other ways than as the wind settles
100 On the sixteen thrifty bridges of the city:
101 Let us unbind our throats of fear and pity.
102 We even,
103 Who drove speediest destruction
104 In corymbulous formations of mechanics,---
105 Who hurried the hill breezes, spouting malice
106 Plangent over meadows, and looked down
107 On rifts of torn and empty houses
108 Like old women with teeth unjubilant
109 That waited faintly, briefly and in vain:
110 We know, eternal gunman, our flesh remembers
111 The tensile boughs, the nimble blue plateaus,
112 The mounted, yielding cities of the air!
113 That saddled sky that shook down vertical
114 Repeated play of fire---no hypogeum
115 Of wave or rock was good against one hour.
116 We did not ask for that, but have survived,
117 And will persist to speak again before
118 All stubble streets that have not curved
119 To memory, or known the ominous lifted arm
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120 That lowers down the arc of Helen\'s brow
121 To saturate with blessing and dismay.
122 A goose, tobacco and cologne---
123 Three winged and gold-shod prophecies of heaven,
124 The lavish heart shall always have to leaven
125 And spread with bells and voices, and atone
126 The abating shadows of our conscript dust.
127 Anchises\' navel, dripping of the sea,---
128 The hands Erasmus dipped in gleaming tides,
129 Gathered the voltage of blown blood and vine;
130 Delve upward for the new and scattered wine,
131 O brother-thief of time, that we recall.
132 Laugh out the meager penance of their days
133 Who dare not share with us the breath released,
134 The substance drilled and spent beyond repair
135 For golden, or the shadow of gold hair.
136 Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile
137 Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the height
138 The imagination spans beyond despair,
139 Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer.
[Page 33 ]作者: 王敖 时间: 2007-8-4 13:22
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: AT MELVILLE\'S TOMB [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
2 The dice of drowned men\'s bones he saw bequeath
3 An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
4 Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
5 And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
6 The calyx of death\'s bounty giving back
7 A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
8 The portent wound in corridors of shells.
9 Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
10 Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
11 Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
12 And silent answers crept across the stars.
13 Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
14 No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
15 Monody shall not wake the mariner.
16 This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.
[Page 34 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: VOYAGES [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
I
1 Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
2 Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
3 They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
4 And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
5 Gaily digging and scattering.
6 And in answer to their treble interjections
7 The sun beats lightning on the waves,
8 The waves fold thunder on the sand;
9 And could they hear me I would tell them:
10 O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
11 Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
12 By time and the elements; but there is a line
13 You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
14 Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
15 Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
16 The bottom of the sea is cruel.
[Page 35 ]
II
17 ---And yet this great wink of eternity,
18 Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
19 Samite sheeted and processioned where
20 Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
21 Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;
22 Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
23 On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
24 The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
25 As her demeanors motion well or ill,
26 All but the pieties of lovers\' hands.
27 And onward, as bells off San Salvador
28 Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
29 In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,---
30 Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
31 Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.
32 Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
33 And hasten while her penniless rich palms
34 Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,---
35 Hasten, while they are true,---sleep, death, desire,
36 Close round one instant in one floating flower.
37 Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
38 O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
39 Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
40 Is answered in the vortex of our grave
41 The seal\'s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
[Page 36 ]
III
42 Infinite consanguinity it bears---
43 This tendered theme of you that light
44 Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
45 Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
46 While ribboned water lanes I wind
47 Are laved and scattered with no stroke
48 Wide from your side, whereto this hour
49 The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.
50 And so, admitted through black swollen gates
51 That must arrest all distance otherwise,---
52 Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
53 Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
54 Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
55 Your body rocking!
56 and where death, if shed,
57 Presumes no carnage, but this single change,---
58 Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
59 The silken skilled transmemberment of song;
60 Permit me voyage, love, into your hands ...
[Page 37 ]
IV
61 Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose
62 I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge
63 Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings
64 Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe
65 Chilled albatross\'s white immutability)
66 No stream of greater love advancing now
67 Than, singing, this mortality alone
68 Through clay aflow immortally to you.
69 All fragrance irrefragably, and claim
70 Madly meeting logically in this hour
71 And region that is ours to wreathe again,
72 Portending eyes and lips and making told
73 The chancel port and portion of our June---
74 Shall they not stem and close in our own steps
75 Bright staves of flowers and quills today as I
76 Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?
77 In signature of the incarnate word
78 The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling
79 Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown
80 And widening noon within your breast for gathering
81 All bright insinuations that my years have caught
82 For islands where must lead inviolably
83 Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,---
84 In this expectant, still exclaim receive
85 The secret oar and petals of all love.
[Page 38 ]
V
86 Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,
87 Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast
88 Together in one merciless white blade---
89 The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.
90 ---As if too brittle or too clear to touch!
91 The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,
92 Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.
93 One frozen trackless smile ... What words
94 Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we
95 Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword
96 Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge,
97 Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved
98 And changed ... "There\'s
99 Nothing like this in the world," you say,
100 Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look
101 Too, into that godless cleft of sky
102 Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing.
103 "---And never to quite understand!" No,
104 In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed
105 Nothing so flagless as this piracy.
106 But now
107 Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.
108 Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;
109 Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
110 Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.
[Page 39 ]
VI
111 Where icy and bright dungeons lift
112 Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,
113 And ocean rivers, churning, shift
114 Green borders under stranger skies,
115 Steadily as a shell secretes
116 Its beating leagues of monotone,
117 Or as many waters trough the sun\'s
118 Red kelson past the cape\'s wet stone;
119 O rivers mingling toward the sky
120 And harbor of the phoenix\' breast---
121 My eyes pressed black against the prow,
122 ---Thy derelict and blinded guest
123 Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke,
124 I cannot claim: let thy waves rear
125 More savage than the death of kings,
126 Some splintered garland for the seer.
127 Beyond siroccos harvesting
128 The solstice thunders, crept away,
129 Like a cliff swinging or a sail
130 Flung into April\'s inmost day---
131 Creation\'s blithe and petalled word
132 To the lounged goddess when she rose
133 Conceding dialogue with eyes
134 That smile unsearchable repose---
135 Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle,
136 ---Unfolded floating dais before
[Page 40 ]
137 Which rainbows twine continual hair---
138 Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!
139 The imaged Word, it is, that holds
140 Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
141 It is the unbetrayable reply
142 Whose accent no farewell can know.
[Page 41 ]
THE BRIDGE
[End note: 1Kb]
Epigraph
From going to and fro in the earth,
and from walking up and down in it.
THE BOOK OF JOB
[Page 43 ]作者: 王敖 时间: 2007-8-4 13:22
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: TO
BROOKLYN BRIDGE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
2 The seagull\'s wings shall dip and pivot him,
3 Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
4 Over the chained bay waters Liberty---
5 Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
6 As apparitional as sails that cross
7 Some page of figures to be filed away;
8 ---Till elevators drop us from our day ...
9 I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
10 With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
11 Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
12 Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;
13 And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
14 As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
15 Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,---
16 Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
17 Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
18 A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
19 Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
20 A jest falls from the speechless caravan.
21 Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
22 A rip-tooth of the sky\'s acetylene;
23 All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn ...
24 Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.
25 And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
26 Thy guerdon ... Accolade thou dost bestow
[Page 44 ]
27 Of anonymity time cannot raise:
28 Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.
29 O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
30 (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
31 Terrific threshold of the prophet\'s pledge,
32 Prayer of pariah, and the lover\'s cry,---
33 Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
34 Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
35 Beading thy path---condense eternity:
36 And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
37 Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
38 Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
39 The City\'s fiery parcels all undone,
40 Already snow submerges an iron year ...
41 O Sleepless as the river under thee,
42 Vaulting the sea, the prairies\' dreaming sod,
43 Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
44 And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
[Page 45 ]
I AVE MARIA
[End note: 3Kb]
Epigraph
Venient annis, saecula seris,
Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
Laxet et ingens pateat tellus
Tethysque novos detegat orbes
Nec sit terris ultima Thule.
---SENECA
[Page 47 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: AVE MARIA [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
1 Be with me, Luis de San Angel, now---
2 Witness before the tides can wrest away [Side note: 1Kb]
3 The word I bring, O you who reined my suit
4 Into the Queen\'s great heart that doubtful day;
5 For I have seen now what no perjured breath
6 Of clown nor sage can riddle or gainsay;---
7 To you, too, Juan Perez, whose counsel fear
8 And greed adjourned,---I bring you back Cathay!
9 Here waves climb into dusk on gleaming mail;
10 Invisible valves of the sea,---locks, tendons
11 Crested and creeping, troughing corridors
12 That fall back yawning to another plunge.
13 Slowly the sun\'s red caravel drops light
14 Once more behind us.... It is morning there---
15 O where our Indian emperies lie revealed,
16 Yet lost, all, let this keel one instant yield!
17 I thought of Genoa; and this truth, now proved,
18 That made me exile in her streets, stood me
19 More absolute than ever---biding the moon
20 Till dawn should clear that dim frontier, first seen
21 ---The Chan\'s great continent.... Then faith, not fear
22 Nigh surged me witless.... Hearing the surf near---
23 I, wonder-breathing, kept the watch,---saw
24 The first palm chevron the first lighted hill.
25 And lowered. And they came out to us crying,
26 "The Great White Birds!" (O Madre Maria, still
27 One ship of these thou grantest safe returning;
28 Assure us through thy mantle\'s ageless blue!)
29 And record of more, floating in a casque,
30 Was tumbled from us under bare poles scudding;
[Page 48 ]
31 And later hurricanes may claim more pawn....
32 For here between two worlds, another, harsh,
33 This third, of water, tests the word; lo, here
34 Bewilderment and mutiny heap whelming
35 Laughter, and shadow cuts sleep from the heart
36 Almost as though the Moor\'s flung scimitar
37 Found more than flesh to fathom in its fall.
38 Yet under tempest-lash and surfeitings
39 Some inmost sob, half-heard, dissuades the abyss,
40 Merges the wind in measure to the waves,
41 Series on series, infinite,---till eyes
42 Starved wide on blackened tides, accrete---enclose
43 This turning rondure whole, this crescent ring
44 Sun-cusped and zoned with modulated fire
45 Like pearls that whisper through the Doge\'s hands
46 ---Yet no delirium of jewels! O Fernando,
47 Take of that eastern shore, this western sea,
48 Yet yield thy God\'s, thy Virgin\'s charity!
49 ---Rush down the plenitude, and you shall see
50 Isaiah counting famine on this lee!
51 An herb, a stray branch among salty teeth,
52 The jellied weeds that drag the shore,---perhaps
53 Tomorrow\'s moon will grant us Saltes Bar---
54 Palos again,---a land cleared of long war.
55 Some Angelus environs the cordage tree;
56 Dark waters onward shake the dark prow free.
[Page 49 ]
57 O Thou who sleepest on Thyself, apart
58 Like ocean athwart lanes of death and birth,
59 And all the eddying breath between dost search
60 Cruelly with love thy parable of man,---
61 Inquisitor! incognizable Word
62 Of Eden and the enchained Sepulchre,
63 Into thy steep savannahs, burning blue,
64 Utter to loneliness the sail is true.
65 Who grindest oar, and arguing the mast
66 Subscribest holocaust of ships, O Thou
67 Within whose primal scan consummately
68 The glistening seignories of Ganges swim;---
69 Who sendest greeting by the corposant,
70 And Teneriffe\'s garnet---flamed it in a cloud,
71 Urging through night our passage to the Chan;---
72 Te Deum laudamus, for thy teeming span!
73 Of all that amplitude that time explores,
74 A needle in the sight, suspended north,---
75 Yielding by inference and discard, faith
76 And true appointment from the hidden shoal:
77 This disposition that thy night relates
78 From Moon to Saturn in one sapphire wheel:
79 The orbic wake of thy once whirling feet,
80 Elohim, still I hear thy sounding heel!
81 White toil of heaven\'s cordons, mustering
82 In holy rings all sails charged to the far
83 Hushed gleaming fields and pendant seething wheat
84 Of knowledge,---round thy brows unhooded now
85 ---The kindled Crown! acceded of the poles
86 And biassed by full sails, meridians reel
[Page 50 ]
87 Thy purpose---still one shore beyond desire!
88 The sea\'s green crying towers a-sway, Beyond
89 And kingdoms
90 naked in the
91 trembling heart---
92 Te Deum laudamus
93 O Thou Hand of Fire
[Page 51 ]
II POWHATAN\'S DAUGHTER
Epigraph
"---Pocahuntus, a well-featured but wanton yong girle ... of the age of eleven or twelve years, get the boyes forth with her into the market place, and make them wheele, falling on their hands, turning their heels upwards, whom she would followe, and wheele so herself, naked as she was, all the fort over."
[Page 53 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE HARBOR DAWN [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 3Kb]
1 Insistently through sleep---a tide of voices--- [Side note: 1Kb]
2 They meet you listening midway in your dream,
3 The long, tired sounds, fog-insulated noises:
4 Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails,
5 Far strum of fog horns ... signals dispersed in veils.
6 And then a truck will lumber past the wharves
7 As winch engines begin throbbing on some deck;
8 Or a drunken stevedore\'s howl and thud below
9 Comes echoing alley-upward through dim snow.
10 And if they take your sleep away sometimes
11 They give it back again. Soft sleeves of sound
12 Attend the darkling harbor, the pillowed bay;
13 Somewhere out there in blankness steam
14 Spills into steam, and wanders, washed away
15 ---Flurried by keen firings, eddied
16 Among distant chiming buoys---adrift. The sky,
17 Cool feathery fold, suspends, distills
18 This wavering slumber.... Slowly---
19 Immemorially the window, the half-covered chair
20 Ask nothing but this sheath of pallid air.
21 And you beside me, blessd now while sirens [Side note: 1Kb]
22 Sing to us, stealthily weave us into day---
23 Serenely now, before day claims our eyes
24 Your cool arms murmurously about me lay.
25 While myriad snowy hands are clustering at the panes---
26 your hands within my hands are deeds;
27 my tongue upon your throat---singing
[Page 54 ]
28 arms close; eyes wide, undoubtful
29 dark
30 drink the dawn---
31 a forest shudders in your hair! [Side note: 1Kb]
32 The window goes blond slowly. Frostily clears.
33 From Cyclopean towers across Manhattan waters
34 ---Two---three bright window-eyes aglitter, disk
35 The sun, released---aloft with cold gulls hither.
36 The fog leans one last moment on the sill. [Side note: 1Kb]
37 Under the mistletoe of dreams, a star---
38 As though to join us at some distant hill---
39 Turns in the waking west and goes to sleep.
[Page 55 ]作者: 王敖 时间: 2007-8-4 13:22
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: VAN WINKLE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny---s belt,
2 Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate: [Side note: 1Kb]
3 Listen! the miles a hurdy-gurdy grinds---
4 Down gold arpeggios mile on mile unwinds.
5 Times earlier, when you hurried off to school,
6 ---It is the same hour though a later day---
7 You walked with Pizarro in a copybook,
8 And Cortes rode up, reining tautly in---
9 Firmly as coffee grips the taste,---and away!
10 There was Priscilla\'s cheek close in the wind,
11 And Captain Smith, all beard and certainty,
12 And Rip Van Winkle bowing by the way,---
13 "Is this Sleepy Hollow, friend---?" And he--- [Side note: 1Kb]
14 And Rip forgot the office hours,
15 and he forgot the pay;
16 Van Winkle sweeps a tenement
17 way down on Avenue A,---
18 The grind-organ says ... Remember, remember
19 The cinder pile at the end of the backyard
20 Where we stoned the family of young
21 Garter snakes under ... And the monoplanes
22 We launched---with paper wings and twisted
23 Rubber bands ... Recall---recall
24 the rapid tongues
25 That flittered from under the ash heap day
26 After day whenever your stick discovered
27 Some sunning inch of unsuspecting fibre---
28 It flashed back at your thrust, as clean as fire.
[Page 56 ]
29 And Rip was slowly made aware
30 that he, Van Winkle, was not here
31 nor there. He woke and swore he\'d seen Broadway
32 a Catskill daisy chain in May---
33 So memory, that strikes a rhyme out of a box,
34 Or splits a random smell of flowers through glass---
35 Is it the whip stripped from the lilac tree
36 One day in spring my father took to me,
37 Or is it the Sabbatical, unconscious smile
38 My mother almost brought me once from church
39 And once only, as I recall---?
40 It flickered through the snow screen, blindly
41 It forsook her at the doorway, it was gone
42 Before I had left the window. It
43 Did not return with the kiss in the hall.
44 Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny\'s belt,
45 45 Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate ...
46 Keep hold of that nickel for car-change, Rip,---
47 Have you got your "Times"---?
48 And hurry along, Van Winkle---it\'s getting late!
[Page 57 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE RIVER [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Stick your patent name on a signboard
2 brother---all over---going west---young man
3 Tintex---Japalac---Certain-teed Overalls ads [Side note: 1Kb]
4 and lands sakes! under the new playbill ripped
5 in the guaranteed corner---see Bert Williams what?
6 Minstrels when you steal a chicken just
7 save me the wing for if it isn\'t
8 Erie it ain\'t for miles around a
9 Mazda---and the telegraphic night coming on Thomas
10 a Ediford---and whistling down the tracks
11 a headlight rushing with the sound---can you
12 imagine---while an EXpress makes time like
13 SCIENCE---COMMERCE and the HOLYGHOST
14 RADIO ROARS IN EVERY HOME WE HAVE THE NORTHPOLE
15 WALLSTREET AND VIRGINBIRTH WITHOUT STONES OR
16 WIRES OR EVEN RUNning brooks connecting ears
17 and no more sermons windows flashing roar
18 breathtaking---as you like it ... eh?
19 So the 20th Century---so
20 whizzed the Limited---roared by and left
21 three men, still hungry on the tracks, ploddingly
22 watching the tail lights wizen and converge, slip-
23 ping gimleted and neatly out of sight.
24 The last bear, shot drinking in the Dakotas
25 Loped under wires that span the mountain stream.
26 Keen instruments, strung to a vast precision
27 Bind town to town and dream to ticking dream.
28 But some men take their liquor slow---and count [Side note: 1Kb]
29 ---Though they\'ll confess no rosary nor clue---
[Page 58 ]
30 The river\'s minute by the far brook\'s year. [Side note: 1Kb]
31 Under a world of whistles, wires and steam
32 Caboose-like they go ruminating through
33 Ohio, Indiana---blind baggage---
34 To Cheyenne tagging ... Maybe Kalamazoo.
35 Time\'s rendings, time\'s blendings they construe
36 As final reckonings of fire and snow;
37 Strange bird-wit, like the elemental gist
38 Of unwalled winds they offer, singing low
39 My Old Kentucky Home and Casey Jones,
40 Some Sunny Day. I heard a road-gang chanting so.
41 And afterwards, who had a colt\'s eyes---one said,
42 "Jesus! Oh I remember watermelon days!" And sped
43 High in a cloud of merriment, recalled
44 "---And when my Aunt Sally Simpson smiled," he drawled---
45 "It was almost Louisiana, long ago."
46 "There\'s no place like Booneville though, Buddy,"
47 One said, excising a last burr from his vest,
48 "---For early trouting." Then peering in the can,
49 "---But I kept on the tracks." Possessed, resigned,
50 He trod the fire down pensively and grinned,
51 Spreading dry shingles of a beard....
52 Behind
53 My father\'s cannery works I used to see
54 Rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery,
55 The ancient men---wifeless or runaway
56 Hobo-trekkers that forever search
57 An empire wilderness of freight and rails.
58 Each seemed a child, like me, on a loose perch,
59 Holding to childhood like some termless play.
60 John, Jake or Charley, hopping the slow freight
[Page 59 ]
61 ---Memphis to Tallahassee---riding the rods,
62 Blind fists of nothing, humpty-dumpty clods.
63 Yet they touch something like a key perhaps.
64 From pole to pole across the hills, the states
65 ---They know a body under the wide rain; [Side note: 1Kb]
66 Youngsters with eyes like fjords, old reprobates
67 With racetrack jargon,---dotting immensity
68 They lurk across her, knowing her yonder breast
69 Snow-silvered, sumac-stained or smoky blue---
70 Is past the valley-sleepers, south or west.
71 ---As I have trod the rumorous midnights, too,
72 And past the circuit of the lamp\'s thin flame
73 (O Nights that brought me to her body bare!)
74 Have dreamed beyond the print that bound her name.
75 Trains sounding the long blizzards out---I heard
76 Wail into distances I knew were hers.
77 Papooses crying on the wind\'s long mane
78 Screamed redskin dynasties that fled the brain,
79 ---Dead echoes! But I knew her body there,
80 Time like a serpent down her shoulder, dark,
81 And space, an eaglet\'s wing, laid on her hair.
82 Under the Ozarks, domed by Iron Mountain,
83 The old gods of the rain lie wrapped in pools
84 Where eyeless fish curvet a sunken fountain [Side note: 1Kb]
85 And re-descend with corn from querulous crows.
86 Such pilferings make up their timeless eatage,
87 Propitiate them for their timber torn
88 By iron, iron---always the iron dealt cleavage!
89 They doze now, below axe and powder horn.
[Page 60 ]
90 And Pullman breakfasters glide glistening steel
91 From tunnel into field---iron strides the dew---
92 Straddles the hill, a dance of wheel on wheel.
93 You have a half-hour\'s wait at Siskiyou,
94 Or stay the night and take the next train through.
95 Southward, near Cairo passing, you can see
96 The Ohio merging,---borne down Tennessee;
97 And if it\'s summer and the sun\'s in dusk
98 Maybe the breeze will lift the River\'s musk
99 ---As though the waters breathed that you might know
100 Memphis Johnny, Steamboat Bill, Missouri Joe.
101 Oh, lean from the window, if the train slows down,
102 As though you touched hands with some ancient clown,
103 ---A little while gaze absently below
104 And hum Deep River with them while they go.
105 Yes, turn again and sniff once more---look see,
106 O Sheriff, Brakeman and Authority---
107 Hitch up your pants and crunch another quid,
108 For you, too, feed the River timelessly.
109 And few evade full measure of their fate;
110 Always they smile out eerily what they seem.
111 I could believe he joked at heaven\'s gate---
112 Dan Midland---jolted from the cold brake-beam.
113 Down, down---born pioneers in time\'s despite,
114 Grimed tributaries to an ancient flow---
115 They win no frontier by their wayward plight,
116 But drift in stillness, as from Jordan\'s brow.
117 You will not hear it as the sea; even stone
118 Is not more hushed by gravity ... But slow,
119 As loth to take more tribute---sliding prone
120 Like one whose eyes were buried long ago
[Page 61 ]
121 The River, spreading, flows---and spends your dream.
122 What are you, lost within this tideless spell?
123 You are your father\'s father, and the stream---
124 A liquid theme that floating niggers swell.
125 Damp tonnage and alluvial march of days---
126 Nights turbid, vascular with silted shale
127 And roots surrendered down of moraine clays:
128 The Mississippi drinks the farthest dale.
129 O quarrying passion, undertowed sunlight!
130 The basalt surface drags a jungle grace
131 Ochreous and lynx-barred in lengthening might;
132 Patience! and you shall reach the hiding place!
133 Over De Soto\'s bones the freighted floors
134 Throb past the City storied of three thrones.
135 Down two more turns the Mississippi pours
136 (Anon tall ironsides up from salt lagoons)
137 And flows within itself, heaps itself free.
138 All fades but one thin skyline \'round ... Ahead
139 No embrace opens but the stinging sea;
140 The River lifts itself from its long bed,
141 Poised wholly on its dream, a mustard glow
142 Tortured with history, its one will---flow!
143 ---The Passion spreads in wide tongues, choked and slow,
144 Meeting the Gulf, hosannas silently below.
[Page 62 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE DANCE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 The swift red flesh, a winter king--- [Side note: 1Kb]
2 Who squired the glacier woman down the sky?
3 She ran the neighing canyons all the spring;
4 She spouted arms; she rose with maize---to die.
5 And in the autumn drouth, whose burnished hands
6 With mineral wariness found out the stone
7 Where prayers, forgotten, streamed the mesa sands?
8 He holds the twilight\'s dim, perpetual throne.
9 Mythical brows we saw retiring---loth,
10 Disturbed and destined, into denser green.
11 Greeting they sped us, on the arrow\'s oath:
12 Now lie incorrigibly what years between ...
13 There was a bed of leaves, and broken play;
14 There was a veil upon you, Pocahontas, bride---
15 O Princess whose brown lap was virgin May;
16 And bridal flanks and eyes hid tawny pride.
17 I left the village for dogwood. By the canoe
18 Tugging below the mill-race, I could see
19 Your hair\'s keen crescent running, and the blue
20 First moth of evening take wing stealthily.
21 What laughing chains the water wove and threw!
22 I learned to catch the trout\'s moon whisper; I
23 Drifted how many hours I never knew,
24 But, watching, saw that fleet young crescent die,---
25 And one star, swinging, take its place, alone,
26 Cupped in the larches of the mountain pass---
27 Until, immortally, it bled into the dawn.
28 I left my sleek boat nibbling margin grass ...
[Page 63 ]
29 I took the portage climb, then chose
30 A further valley-shed; I could not stop.
31 Feet nozzled wat\'ry webs of upper flows;
32 One white veil gusted from the very top.
33 O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;
34 Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends
35 And northward reaches in that violet wedge
36 Of Adirondacks!---wisped of azure wands,
37 Over how many bluffs, tarns, streams I sped!
38 ---And knew myself within some boding shade:---
39 Grey tepees tufting the blue knolls ahead,
40 Smoke swirling through the yellow chestnut glade ...
41 A distant cloud, a thunder-bud---it grew,
42 That blanket of the skies: the padded foot
43 Within,---I heard it; \'til its rhythm drew,
44 ---Siphoned the black pool from the heart\'s hot root!
45 A cyclone threshes in the turbine crest,
46 Swooping in eagle feathers down your back;
47 Know, Maquokeeta, greeting; know death\'s best;
48 ---Fall, Sachem, strictly as the tamarack!
49 A birch kneels. All her whistling fingers fly.
50 The oak grove circles in a crash of leaves;
51 The long moan of a dance is in the sky.
52 Dance, Maquokeeta: Pocahontas grieves ...
53 And every tendon scurries toward the twangs
54 Of lightning deltaed down your saber hair.
55 Now snaps the flint in every tooth; red fangs
56 And splay tongues thinly busy the blue air ...
[Page 64 ]
57 Dance, Maquokeeta! snake that lives before,
58 That casts his pelt, and lives beyond! Sprout, horn!
59 Spark, tooth! Medicine-man, relent, restore---
60 Lie to us,---dance us back the tribal morn!
61 Spears and assemblies: black drums thrusting on---
62 O yelling battlements,---I, too, was liege
63 To rainbows currying each pulsant bone:
64 Surpassed the circumstance, danced out the siege!
65 And buzzard-circleted, screamed from the stake;
66 I could not pick the arrows from my side.
67 Wrapped in that fire, I saw more escorts wake---
68 Flickering, sprint up the hill groins like a tide.
69 I heard the hush of lava wrestling your arms,
70 And stag teeth foam about the raven throat;
71 Flame cataracts of heaven in seething swarms
72 Fed down your anklets to the sunset\'s moat.
73 O, like the lizard in the furious noon,
74 That drops his legs and colors in the sun,
75 ---And laughs, pure serpent, Time itself, and moon
76 Of his own fate, I saw thy change begun!
77 And saw thee dive to kiss that destiny
78 Like one white meteor, sacrosanct and blent
79 At last with all that\'s consummate and free
80 There, where the first and last gods keep thy tent.
81 Thewed of the levin, thunder-shod and lean,
82 Lo, through what infinite seasons dost thou gaze---
[Page 65 ]
83 Across what bivouacs of thine angered slain,
84 And see\'st thy bride immortal in the maize!
85 Totem and fire-gall, slumbering pyramid---
86 Though other calendars now stack the sky,
87 Thy freedom is her largesse, Prince, and hid
88 On paths thou knewest best to claim her by.
89 High unto Labrador the sun strikes free
90 Her speechless dream of snow, and stirred again,
91 She is the torrent and the singing tree;
92 And she is virgin to the last of men ...
93 West, west and south! winds over Cumberland
94 And winds across the llano grass resume
95 Her hair\'s warm sibilance. Her breasts are fanned
96 O stream by slope and vineyard---into bloom!
97 And when the caribou slant down for salt
98 Do arrows thirst and leap? Do antlers shine
99 Alert, star-triggered in the listening vault
100 Of dusk?---And are her perfect brows to thine?
101 We danced, O Brave, we danced beyond their farms,
102 In cobalt desert closures made our vows ...
103 Now is the strong prayer folded in thine arms,
104 The serpent with the eagle in the boughs.
1 The morning glory, climbing the morning long
2 Over the lintel on its wiry vine, [Side note: 1Kb]
3 Closes before the dusk, furls in its song
4 As I close mine ...
5 And bison thunder rends my dreams no more
6 As once my womb was torn, my boy, when you
7 Yielded your first cry at the prairie\'s door ...
8 Your father knew
9 Then, though we\'d buried him behind us, far
10 Back on the gold trail---then his lost bones stirred ...
11 But you who drop the scythe to grasp the oar
12 Knew not, nor heard
13 How we, too, Prodigal, once rode off, too---
14 Waved Seminary Hill a gay good-bye ...
15 We found God lavish there in Colorado
16 But passing sly.
17 The pebbles sang, the firecat slunk away
18 And glistening through the sluggard freshets came
19 In golden syllables loosed from the clay
20 His gleaming name.
21 A dream called Eldorado was his town,
22 It rose up shambling in the nuggets\' wake,
23 It had no charter but a promised crown
24 Of claims to stake.
25 But we,---too late, too early, howsoever---
26 Won nothing out of fifty-nine---those years---
27 But gilded promise, yielded to us never,
28 And barren tears ...
[Page 67 ]
29 The long trail back! I huddled in the shade
30 Of wagon-tenting looked out once and saw
31 Bent westward, passing on a stumbling jade
32 A homeless squaw---
33 Perhaps a halfbreed. On her slender back
34 She cradled a babe\'s body, riding without rein.
35 Her eyes, strange for an Indian\'s, were not black
36 But sharp with pain
37 And like twin stars. They seemed to shun the gaze
38 Of all our silent men---the long team line---
39 Until she saw me---when their violet haze
40 Lit with love shine ...
41 I held you up---I suddenly the bolder,
42 Knew that mere words could not have brought us nearer.
43 She nodded---and that smile across her shoulder
44 Will still endear her
45 As long as Jim, your father\'s memory, is warm.
46 Yes, Larry, now you\'re going to sea, remember
47 You were the first---before Ned and this farm,---
48 First-born, remember---
49 And since then---all that\'s left to me of Jim
50 Whose folks, like mine, came out of Arrowhead.
51 And you\'re the only one with eyes like him---
52 Kentucky bred!
53 I\'m standing still, I\'m old, I\'m half of stone!
54 Oh, hold me in those eyes\' engaging blue;
55 There\'s where the stubborn years gleam and atone,---
56 Where gold is true!
[Page 68 ]
57 Down the dim turnpike to the river\'s edge---
58 Perhaps I\'ll hear the mare\'s hoofs to the ford ...
59 Write me from Rio ... and you\'ll keep your pledge;
60 I know your word!
61 Come back to Indiana---not too late!
62 (Or will you be a ranger to the end?)
63 Good-bye ... Good-bye ... oh, I shall always wait
64 You, Larry, traveller---
65 stranger,
66 son,
67 ---my friend---
[Page 69 ]
III CUTTY SARK
[End note: 1Kb]
Epigraph
O, the navies old and oaken,
O, the Temeraire no more!
---MELVILLE
[Page 71 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: CUTTY SARK [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
1 I met a man in South Street, tall
2 a nervous shark tooth swung on his chain.
3 His eyes pressed through green glass
4 ---green glasses, or bar lights made them
5 so---
6 shine---
7 GREEN---
8 eyes---
9 stepped out---forgot to look at you
10 or left you several blocks away---
11 in the nickel-in-the-slot piano jogged
12 "Stamboul Nights"---weaving somebody\'s nickel---sang---
13 O Stamboul Rose---dreams weave the rose!
14 Murmurs of Leviathan he spoke,
15 and rum was Plato in our heads ...
16 "It\'s S.S. Ala---Antwerp---now remember kid
17 to put me out at three she sails on time.
18 I\'m not much good at time any more keep
19 weakeyed watches sometimes snooze---" his bony hands
20 got to beating time ... "A whaler once---
21 I ought to keep time and get over it---I\'m a
22 Democrat---I know what time it is---No
23 I don\'t want to know what time it is---that
24 damned white Arctic killed my time..."
25 O Stamboul Rose---drums weave---
26 "I ran a donkey engine down there on the Canal
27 in Panama---got tired of that---
28 then Yucatan selling kitchenware---beads---
[Page 72 ]
29 have you seen Popocatepetl---birdless mouth
30 with ashes sifting down---?
31 and then the coast again..."
32 Rose of Stamboul O coral Queen---
33 teased remnants of the skeletons of cities---
34 and galleries, galleries of watergutted lava
35 snarling stone---green---drums---drown---
36 Sing!
37 "---that spiracle!" he shot a finger out the door ...
38 "O life\'s a geyser---beautiful---my lungs---
39 No---I can\'t live on land---!"
40 I saw the frontiers gleaming of his mind;
41 or are there frontiers---running sands sometimes
42 running sands---somewhere---sands running ...
43 Or they may start some white machine that sings.
44 Then you may laugh and dance the axletree---
45 steel---silver---kick the traces---and know---
46 ATLANTIS ROSE drums wreathe the rose,
47 the star floats burning in a gulf of tears
48 and sleep another thousand---
49 interminably
50 long since somebody\'s nickel---stopped---
51 playing---
52 A wind worried those wicker-neat lapels, the
53 swinging summer entrances to cooler hells ...
54 Outside a wharf truck nearly ran him down
55 ---he lunged up Bowery way while the dawn
[Page 73 ]
56 was putting the Statue of Liberty out---that
57 torch of hers you know---
58 I started walking home across the Bridge ...
59 Blithe Yankee vanities, turreted sprites, winged
60 British repartees, skil-
61 ful savage sea-girls
62 that bloomed in the spring---Heave, weave
63 those bright designs the trade winds drive ...
64 Sweet opium and tea, Yo-ho!
65 Pennies for porpoises that bank the keel!
66 Fins whip the breeze around Japan!
67 Bright skysails ticketing the Line, wink round the Horn
68 to Frisco, Melbourne ...
69 Pennants, parabolas---
70 clipper dreams indelible and ranging,
71 baronial white on lucky blue!
72 Perennial-Cutty-trophied-Sark!
73 Thermopylae, Black Prince, Flying Cloud through Sunda
74 ---scarfed of foam, their bellies veered green esplanades,
75 locked in wind-humors, ran their eastings down;
76 at Java Head freshened the nip
77 (sweet opium and tea!)
78 and turned and left us on the lee ...
81 (last trip a tragedy)---where can you be
82 Nimbus? and you rivals two---
83 a long tack keeping---
84 Taeping?
85 Ariel?
[Page 75 ]
IV CAPE HATTERAS
[End note: 2Kb]
Epigraph
The seas all crossed, weathered the capes, the voyage done ...
---WALT WHITMAN
[Page 77 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: CAPE HATTERAS [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
1 Imponderable the dinosaur
2 sinks slow,
3 the mammoth saurian
4 ghoul, the eastern
5 Cape ...
6 While rises in the west the coastwise range,
7 slowly the hushed land---
8 Combustion at the astral core---the dorsal change
9 Of energy---convulsive shift of sand ...
10 But we, who round the capes, the promontories
11 Where strange tongues vary messages of surf
12 Below grey citadels, repeating to the stars
13 The ancient names---return home to our own
14 Hearths, there to eat an apple and recall
15 The songs that gypsies dealt us at Marseille
16 Or how the priests walked---slowly through Bombay---
17 Or to read you, Walt,---knowing us in thrall
18 To that deep wonderment, our native clay
19 Whose depth of red, eternal flesh of Pocahontas---
20 Those continental folded aeons, surcharged
21 With sweetness below derricks, chimneys, tunnels---
22 Is veined by all that time has really pledged us ...
23 And from above, thin squeaks of radio static,
24 The captured fume of space foams in our ears---
25 What whisperings of far watches on the main
26 Relapsing into silence, while time clears
27 Our lenses, lifts a focus, resurrects
28 A periscope to glimpse what joys or pain
29 Our eyes can share or answer---then deflects
30 Us, shunting to a labyrinth submersed
31 Where each sees only his dim past reversed ...
32 But that star-glistered salver of infinity,
33 The circle, blind crucible of endless space,
[Page 78 ]
34 Is sluiced by motion,---subjugated never.
35 Adam and Adam\'s answer in the forest
36 Left Hesperus mirrored in the lucid pool.
37 Now the eagle dominates our days, is jurist
38 Of the ambiguous cloud. We know the strident rule
39 Of wings imperious ... Space, instantaneous,
40 Flickers a moment, consumes us in its smile:
41 A flash over the horizon---shifting gears---
42 And we have laughter, or more sudden tears.
43 Dream cancels dream in this new realm of fact
44 From which we wake into the dream of act;
45 Seeing himself an atom in a shroud---
46 Man hears himself an engine in a cloud!
47 "---Recorders ages hence"---ah, syllables of faith!
48 Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity
49 Be still the same as when you walked the beach
50 Near Paumanok---your lone patrol---and heard the wraith
51 Through surf, its bird note there a long time falling ...
52 For you, the panoramas and this breed of towers,
53 Of you---the theme that\'s statured in the cliff,
54 O Saunterer on free ways still ahead!
55 Not this our empire yet, but labyrinth
56 Wherein your eyes, like the Great Navigator\'s without ship,
57 Gleam from the great stones of each prison crypt
58 Of canyoned traffic ... Confronting the Exchange,
59 Surviving in a world of stocks,---they also range
60 Across the hills where second timber strays
61 Back over Connecticut farms, abandoned pastures,---
62 Sea eyes and tidal, undenying, bright with myth!
63 The nasal whine of power whips a new universe ...
64 Where spouting pillars spoor the evening sky,
65 65 Under the looming stacks of the gigantic power house
[Page 79 ]
66 Stars prick the eyes with sharp ammoniac proverbs,
67 New verities, new inklings in the velvet hummed
68 Of dynamos, where hearing\'s leash is strummed ...
69 Power\'s script,---wound, bobbin-bound, refined---
70 Is stropped to the slap of belts on booming spools, spurred
71 Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the stars.
72 Towards what? The forked crash of split thunder parts
73 Our hearing momentwise; but fast in whirling armatures,
74 As bright as frogs\' eyes, giggling in the girth
75 Of steely gizzards---axle-bound, confined
76 In coiled precision, bunched in mutual glee
77 The bearings glint,---O murmurless and shined
78 In oilrinsed circles of blind ecstasy!
79 Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas,
80 The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space ...
81 O sinewy silver biplane, nudging the wind\'s withers!
82 There, from Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk
83 Two brothers in their twinship left the dune;
84 Warping the gale, the Wright windwrestlers veered
85 Capeward, then blading the wind\'s flank, banked and spun
86 What ciphers risen from prophetic script,
87 What marathons new-set between the stars!
88 The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches
89 Already knows the closer clasp of Mars,---
90 New latitudes, unknotting, soon give place
91 To what fierce schedules, rife of doom apace!
92 Behold the dragon\'s covey---amphibian, ubiquitous
93 To hedge the seaboard, wrap the headland, ride
94 The blue\'s cloud-templed districts unto ether ...
95 While Iliads glimmer through eyes raised in pride
96 Hell\'s belt springs wider into heaven\'s plumed side.
97 O bright circumferences, heights employed to fly
[Page 80 ]
98 War\'s fiery kennel masked in downy offings,---
99 This tournament of space, the threshed and chiselled height,
100 Is baited by marauding circles, bludgeon flail
101 Of rancorous grenades whose screaming petals carve us
102 Wounds that we wrap with theorems sharp as hail!
103 Wheeled swiftly, wings emerge from larval-silver hangars.
104 Taut motors surge, space-gnawing, into flight;
105 Through sparkling visibility, outspread, unsleeping,
106 Wings clip the last peripheries of light ...
107 Tellurian wind-sleuths on dawn patrol,
108 Each plane a hurtling javelin of winged ordnance,
109 Bristle the heights above a screeching gale to hover;
110 Surely no eye that Sunward Escadrille can cover!
111 There, meaningful, fledged as the Pleiades
112 With razor sheen they zoom each rapid helix!
113 Up-chartered choristers of their own speeding
114 They, cavalcade on escapade, shear Cumulus---
115 Lay siege and hurdle Cirrus down the skies!
116 While Cetus-like, O thou Dirigible, enormous Lounger
117 Of pendulous auroral beaches,---satellited wide
118 By convoy planes, moonferrets that rejoin thee
119 On fleeing balconies as thou dost glide,
120 ---Hast splintered space!
121 Low, shadowed of the Cape,
122 Regard the moving turrets! From grey decks
123 See scouting griffons rise through gaseous crepe
124 Hung low ... until a conch of thunder answers
125 Cloud-belfries, banging, while searchlights, like fencers,
126 Slit the sky\'s pancreas of foaming anthracite
127 Toward thee, O Corsair of the typhoon,---pilot, hear!
128 Thine eyes bicarbonated white by speed, O Skygak, see
129 How from thy path above the levin\'s lance
[Page 81 ]
130 Thou sowest doom thou hast nor time nor chance
131 To reckon---as thy stilly eyes partake
132 What alcohol of space..! Remember, Falcon-Ace,
133 Thou hast there in thy wrist a Sanskrit charge
134 To conjugate infinity\'s dim marge---
135 Anew..!
136 But first, here at this height receive
137 The benediction of the shell\'s deep, sure reprieve!
138 Lead-perforated fuselage, escutcheoned wings
139 Lift agonized quittance, tilting from the invisible brink
140 Now eagle-bright, now
141 quarry-hid, twist-
142 -ing, sink with
143 Enormous repercussive list-
144 -ings down
145 Giddily spiralled
146 gauntlets, upturned, unlooping
147 In guerrilla sleights, trapped in combustion gyr-
148 Ing, dance the curdled depth
149 down whizzing
150 Zodiacs, dashed
151 (now nearing fast the Cape!)
152 down gravitation\'s
153 vortex into crashed
154 .... dispersion ... into mashed and shapeless debris....
155 By Hatteras bunched the beached heap of high bravery!
156 The stars have grooved our eyes with old persuasions
157 Of love and hatred, birth,---surcease of nations ...
158 But who has held the heights more sure than thou,
159 O Walt!---Ascensions of thee hover in me now
[Page 82 ]
160 As thou at junctions elegiac, there, of speed
161 With vast eternity, dost wield the rebound seed!
162 The competent loam, the probable grass,---travail
163 Of tides awash the pedestal of Everest, fail
164 Not less than thou in pure impulse inbred
165 To answer deepest soundings! O, upward from the dead
166 Thou bringest tally, and a pact, new bound
167 Of living brotherhood!
168 Thou, there beyond---
169 Glacial sierras and the flight of ravens,
170 Hermetically past condor zones, through zenith havens
171 Past where the albatross has offered up
172 His last wing-pulse, and downcast as a cup
173 That\'s drained, is shivered back to earth---thy wand
174 Has beat a song, O Walt,---there and beyond!
175 And this, thine other hand, upon my heart
176 Is plummet ushered of those tears that start
177 What memories of vigils, bloody, by that Cape,---
178 Ghoul-mound of man\'s perversity at balk
179 And fraternal massacre! Thou, pallid there as chalk
180 Hast kept of wounds, O Mourner, all that sum
181 That then from Appomattox stretched to Somme!
182 Cowslip and shad-blow, flaked like tethered foam
183 Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring
184 When first I read thy lines, rife as the loam
185 Of prairies, yet like breakers cliffward leaping!
186 O, early following thee, I searched the hill
187 Blue-writ and odor-firm with violets, \'til
188 With June the mountain laurel broke through green
189 And filled the forest with what clustrous sheen!
190 Potomac lilies,---then the Pontiac rose,
191 And Klondike edelweiss of occult snows!
[Page 83 ]
192 White banks of moonlight came descending valleys---
193 How speechful on oak-vizored palisades,
194 As vibrantly I following down Sequoia alleys
195 Heard thunder\'s eloquence through green arcades
196 Set trumpets breathing in each clump and grass tuft---\'til
197 Gold autumn, captured, crowned the trembling hill!
198 Panis Angelicus! Eyes tranquil with the blaze
199 Of love\'s own diametric gaze, of love\'s amaze!
200 Not greatest, thou,---not first, nor last,---but near
201 And onward yielding past my utmost year.
202 Familiar, thou, as mendicants in public places;
203 Evasive---too---as dayspring\'s spreading arc to trace is:---
204 Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel;
205 And it was thou who on the boldest heel
206 Stood up and flung the span on even wing
207 Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing!
208 Years of the Modern! Propulsions toward what capes?
209 But thou, Panis Angelicus, hast thou not seen
210 And passed that Barrier that none escapes---
211 But knows it leastwise as death-strife?---O, something green,
212 Beyond all sesames of science was thy choice
213 Wherewith to bind us throbbing with one voice,
214 New integers of Roman, Viking, Celt---
215 Thou, Vedic Caesar, to the greensward knelt!
216 And now, as launched in abysmal cupolas of space,
217 Toward endless terminals, Easters of speeding light---
218 Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace
219 On clarion cylinders pass out of sight
220 To course that span of consciousness thou\'st named
221 The Open Road---thy vision is reclaimed!
222 What heritage thou\'st signalled to our hands!
[Page 84 ]
223 And see! the rainbow\'s arch---how shimmeringly stands
224 Above the Cape\'s ghoul-mound, O joyous seer!
225 Recorders ages hence, yes, they shall hear
226 In their own veins uncancelled thy sure tread
227 And read thee by the aureole \'round thy head
228 Of pasture-shine, Panis Angelicus!
229 yes, Walt,
230 Afoot again, and onward without halt,---
231 Not soon, nor suddenly,---no, never to let go
232 My hand
233 in yours,
234 Walt Whitman---
235 so---
[Page 85 ]
V THREE SONGS
Epigraph
The one Sestos, the other Abydos hight.
---MARLOWE
1 I wanted you, nameless Woman of the South,
2 No wraith, but utterly---as still more alone
3 The Southern Cross takes night
4 And lifts her girdles from her, one by one---
5 High, cool,
6 wide from the slowly smoldering fire
7 Of lower heavens,---
8 vaporous scars!
9 Eve! Magdalene!
10 or Mary, you?
11 Whatever call---falls vainly on the wave.
12 O simian Venus, homeless Eve,
13 Unwedded, stumbling gardenless to grieve
14 Windswept guitars on lonely decks forever;
15 Finally to answer all within one grave!
16 And this long wake of phosphor,
17 iridescent
18 Furrow of all our travel---trailed derision!
19 Eyes crumble at its kiss. Its long-drawn spell
20 Incites a yell. Slid on that backward vision
21 The mind is churned to spittle, whispering hell.
22 I wanted you ... The embers of the Cross
23 Climbed by aslant and huddling aromatically.
24 It is blood to remember; it is fire
25 To stammer back ... It is
26 God---your namelessness. And the wash---
27 All night the water combed you with black
28 Insolence. You crept out simmering, accomplished.
29 Water rattled that stinging coil, your
[Page 88 ]
30 Rehearsed hair---docile, alas, from many arms.
31 Yes, Eve---wraith of my unloved seed!
32 The Cross, a phantom, buckled---dropped below the dawn.
33 Light drowned the lithic trillions of your spawn.
[Page 89 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: NATIONAL WINTER GARDEN [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Outspoken buttocks in pink beads
2 Invite the necessary cloudy clinch
3 Of bandy eyes.... No extra mufflings here:
4 The world\'s one flagrant, sweating cinch.
5 And while legs waken salads in the brain
6 You pick your blonde out neatly through the smoke.
7 Always you wait for someone else though, always---
8 (Then rush the nearest exit through the smoke).
9 Always and last, before the final ring
10 When all the fireworks blare, begins
11 A tom-tom scrimmage with a somewhere violin,
12 Some cheapest echo of them all---begins.
13 And shall we call her whiter than the snow?
14 Sprayed first with ruby, then with emerald sheen---
15 Least tearful and least glad (who knows her smile?)
16 A caught slide shows her sandstone grey between.
17 Her eyes exist in swivellings of her teats,
18 Pearls whip her hips, a drench of whirling strands.
19 Her silly snake rings begin to mount, surmount
20 Each other---turquoise fakes on tinselled hands.
21 We wait that writhing pool, her pearls collapsed,
22 ---All but her belly buried in the floor;
23 And the lewd trounce of a final muted beat!
24 We flee her spasm through a fleshless door....
25 Yet, to the empty trapeze of your flesh,
26 O Magdalene, each comes back to die alone.
27 Then you, the burlesque of our lust---and faith,
28 Lug us back lifeward---bone by infant bone.
[Page 90 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: VIRGINIA [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 O rain at seven,
2 Pay-check at eleven---
3 Keep smiling the boss away,
4 Mary (what are you going to do?)
5 Gone seven---gone eleven,
6 And I\'m still waiting you---
7 O blue-eyed Mary with the claret scarf,
8 Saturday Mary, mine!
9 It\'s high carillon
10 From the popcorn bells!
11 Pigeons by the million---
12 And Spring in Prince Street
13 Where green figs gleam
14 By oyster shells!
15 O Mary, leaning from the high wheat tower,
16 Let down your golden hair!
17 High in the noon of May
18 On cornices of daffodils
19 The slender violets stray.
20 Crap-shooting gangs in Bleecker reign,
21 Peonies with pony manes---
22 Forget-me-nots at windowpanes:
23 Out of the way-up nickel-dime tower shine,
24 Cathedral Mary,
25 shine!---
[Page 91 ]
VI QUAKER HILL
[End note: 1Kb]
Epigraph
I see only the ideal. But no ideals
have ever been fully successful on
this earth.
---ISADORA DUNCAN
Epigraph
The gentian weaves her fringes,
The maple\'s loom is red.
---EMILY DICKINSON
[Page 92 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: QUAKER HILL [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
1 Perspective never withers from their eyes;
2 They keep that docile edict of the Spring
3 That blends March with August Antarctic skies:
4 These are but cows that see no other thing
5 Than grass and snow, and their own inner being
6 Through the rich halo that they do not trouble
7 Even to cast upon the seasons fleeting
8 Though they should thin and die on last year\'s stubble.
9 And they are awkward, ponderous and uncoy ...
10 While we who press the cider mill, regarding them---
11 We, who with pledges taste the bright annoy
12 Of friendship\'s acid wine, retarding phlegm,
13 Shifting reprisals (\'til who shall tell us when
14 The jest is too sharp to be kindly?) boast
15 Much of our store of faith in other men
16 Who would, ourselves, stalk down the merriest ghost.
17 Above them old Mizzentop, palatial white
18 Hostelry---floor by floor to cinquefoil dormer
19 Portholes the ceilings stack their stoic height.
20 Long tiers of windows staring out toward former
21 Faces---loose panes crown the hill and gleam
22 At sunset with a silent, cobwebbed patience
23 See them, like eyes that still uphold some dream
24 Through mapled vistas, cancelled reservations!
25 High from the central cupola, they say
26 One\'s glance could cross the borders of three states;
27 But I have seen death\'s stare in slow survey
28 From four horizons that no one relates ...
29 Weekenders avid of their turf-won scores,
30 Here three hours from the semaphores, the Czars
[Page 93 ]
31 Of golf, by twos and threes in plaid plusfours
32 Alight with sticks abristle and cigars.
33 This was the Promised Land, and still it is
34 To the persuasive suburban land agent
35 In bootleg roadhouses where the gin fizz
36 Bubbles in time to Hollywood\'s new love-nest pageant.
37 Fresh from the radio in the old Meeting House
38 (Now the New Avalon Hotel) volcanoes roar
39 A welcome to highsteppers that no mouse
40 Who saw the Friends there ever heard before.
41 What cunning neighbors history has in fine!
42 The woodlouse mortgages the ancient deal
43 Table that Powitzky buys for only nine-
44 Ty-five at Adams\' auction,---eats the seal,
45 The spinster polish of antiquity ...
46 Who holds the lease on time and on disgrace?
47 What eats the pattern with ubiquity?
48 Where are my kinsmen and the patriarch race?
49 The resigned factions of the dead preside.
50 Dead rangers bled their comfort on the snow;
51 But I must ask slain Iroquois to guide
52 Me farther than scalped Yankees knew to go:
53 Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage,
54 Wait for the postman driving from Birch Hill
55 With birthright by blackmail, the arrant page
56 That unfolds a new destiny to fill....
57 So, must we from the hawk\'s far stemming view,
58 Must we descend as worm\'s eye to construe
59 Our love of all we touch, and take it to the Gate
[Page 94 ]
60 As humbly as a guest who knows himself too late,
61 His news already told? Yes, while the heart is wrung,
62 Arise---yes, take this sheaf of dust upon your tongue!
63 In one last angelus lift throbbing throat---
64 Listen, transmuting silence with that stilly note
65 Of pain that Emily, that Isadora knew!
66 While high from dim elm-chancels hung with dew,
67 That triple-noted clause of moonlight---
68 Yes, whip-poor-will, unhusks the heart of fright,
69 Breaks us and saves, yes, breaks the heart, yet yields
70 That patience that is armour and that shields
71 Love from despair---when love foresees the end---
72 Leaf after autumnal leaf
73 break off,
74 descend---
75 descend---
[Page 95 ]
VII THE TUNNEL
[End note: 1Kb]
Epigraph
To Find the Western path
Right thro\' the Gates of Wrath.
---BLAKE
[Page 97 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE TUNNEL [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
1 Performances, assortments, résumés---
2 Up Times Square to Columbus Circle lights
3 Channel the congresses, nightly sessions,
4 Refractions of the thousand theatres, faces---
5 Mysterious kitchens.... You shall search them all.
6 Someday by heart you\'ll learn each famous sight
7 And watch the curtain lift in hell\'s despite;
8 You\'ll find the garden in the third act dead,
9 Finger your knees---and wish yourself in bed
10 With tabloid crime-sheets perched in easy sight.
11 Then let you reach your hat
12 and go.
13 As usual, let you---also
14 walking down---exclaim
15 to twelve upward leaving
16 a subscription praise
17 for what time slays.
18 Or can\'t you quite make up your mind to ride;
19 A walk is better underneath the L a brisk
20 Ten blocks or so before? But you find yourself
21 Preparing penguin flexions of the arms,---
22 As usual you will meet the scuttle yawn:
23 The subway yawns the quickest promise home.
24 Be minimum, then, to swim the hiving swarms
25 ---Out of the Square, the Circle burning bright---
26 Avoid the glass doors gyring at your right,
27 Where boxed alone a second, eyes take fright
28 ---Quite unprepared rush naked back to light:
29 And down beside the turnstile press the coin
30 Into the slot. The gongs already rattle.
[Page 98 ]
31 And so
32 of cities you bespeak
33 subways, rivered under streets
34 and rivers.... In the car
35 the overtone of motion
36 underground, the monotone
37 of motion is the sound
38 of other faces, also underground---
39 "Let\'s have a pencil Jimmy---living now
40 at Floral Park
41 Flatbush---on the fourth of July---
42 like a pigeon\'s muddy dream---potatoes
43 to dig in the field-travlin the town---too---
44 night after night---the Culver line---the
45 girls all shaping up---it used to be---"
46 Our tongues recant like beaten weather vanes.
47 This answer lives like verdigris, like hair
48 Beyond extinction, surcease of the bone;
49 And repetition freezes---What
50 "what do you want? getting weak on the links?
51 fandaddle daddy don\'t ask for change---IS THIS
52 FOURTEENTH? it\'s half past six she said---if
53 you don\'t like my gate why did you
54 swing on it, why didja
55 swing on it
56 anyhow---"
57 And somehow anyhow swing---
58 The phonographs of hades in the brain
59 Are tunnels that re-wind themselves, and love
[Page 99 ]
60 A burnt match skating in a urinal---
61 Somewhere above Fourteenth TAKE THE EXPRESS
62 To brush some new presentiment of pain---
63 "But I want service in this office SERVICE
64 I said---after
65 the show she cried a little afterwards but---"
66 Whose head is swinging from the swollen strap?
67 Whose body smokes along the bitten rails,
68 Bursts from a smoldering bundle far behind
69 In back forks of the chasms of the brain,---
70 Puffs from a riven stump far out behind
71 In interborough fissures of the mind ...?
72 And why do I often meet your visage here,
73 Your eyes like agate lanterns---on and on
74 Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads?
75 ---And did their riding eyes right through your side,
76 And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride?
77 And Death, aloft,---gigantically down
78 Probing through you---toward me, O evermore!
79 And when they dragged your retching flesh,
80 Your trembling hands that night through Baltimore---
81 That last night on the ballot rounds, did you,
82 Shaking, did you deny the ticket, Poe?
83 For Gravesend Manor change at Chambers Street.
84 The platform hurries along to a dead stop.
85 The intent escalator lifts a serenade
86 Stilly
87 Of shoes, umbrellas, each eye attending its shoe, then
88 Bolting outright somewhere above where streets
[Page 100 ]
89 Burst suddenly in rain.... The gongs recur:
90 Elbows and levers, guard and hissing door.
91 Thunder is galvothermic here below.... The car
92 Wheels off. The train rounds, bending to a scream,
93 Taking the final level for the dive
94 Under the river---
95 And somewhat emptier than before,
96 Demented, for a hitching second, humps; then
97 Lets go.... Toward corners of the floor
98 Newspapers wing, revolve and wing.
99 Blank windows gargle signals through the roar.
100 And does the Daemon take you home, also,
101 Wop washerwoman, with the bandaged hair?
102 After the corridors are swept, the cuspidors---
103 The gaunt sky-barracks cleanly now, and bare,
104 O Genoese, do you bring mother eyes and hands
105 Back home to children and to golden hair?
106 Daemon, demurring and eventful yawn!
107 Whose hideous laughter is a bellows mirth
108 ---Or the muffled slaughter of a day in birth---
109 O cruelly to inoculate the brinking dawn
110 With antennae toward worlds that glow and sink;---
111 To spoon us out more liquid than the dim
112 Locution of the eldest star, and pack
113 The conscience navelled in the plunging wind,
114 Umbilical to call---and straightway die!
115 O caught like pennies beneath soot and steam,
116 Kiss of our agony thou gatherest;
117 Condensed, thou takest all---shrill ganglia
118 Impassioned with some song we fail to keep.
119 And yet, like Lazarus, to feel the slope,
[Page 101 ]
120 The sod and billow breaking,---lifting ground,
121 ---A sound of waters bending astride the sky
122 Unceasing with some Word that will not die...!
123 A tugboat, wheezing wreaths of steam,
124 Lunged past, with one galvanic blare stove up the River.
125 I counted the echoes assembling, one after one,
126 Searching, thumbing the midnight on the piers.
127 Lights, coasting, left the oily tympanum of waters;
128 The blackness somewhere gouged glass on a sky.
129 And this thy harbor, O my City, I have driven under,
130 Tossed from the coil of ticking towers.... Tomorrow,
131 And to be.... Here by the River that is East---
132 Here at the waters\' edge the hands drop memory;
133 Shadowless in that abyss they unaccounting lie.
134 How far away the star has pooled the sea---
135 Or shall the hands be drawn away, to die?
136 Kiss of our agony Thou gatherest,
137 O Hand of Fire
138 gatherest---
[Page 103 ]
VIII ATLANTIS
[End note: 1Kb]
Epigraph
Music is then the knowledge of that which relates to love in harmony and system.
---PLATO
[Page 105 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: ATLANTIS [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
1 Through the bound cable strands, the arching path
2 Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,---
3 Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate
4 The whispered rush, telepathy of wires.
5 Up the index of night, granite and steel---
6 Transparent meshes---fleckless the gleaming staves---
7 Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream
8 As though a god were issue of the strings....
9 And through that cordage, threading with its call
10 One arc synoptic of all tides below---
11 Their labyrinthine mouths of history
12 Pouring reply as though all ships at sea
13 Complighted in one vibrant breath made cry,---
14 "Make thy love sure---to weave whose song we ply!"
15 ---From black embankments, moveless soundings hailed,
16 So seven oceans answer from their dream.
17 And on, obliquely up bright carrier bars
18 New octaves trestle the twin monoliths
19 Beyond whose frosted capes the moon bequeaths
20 Two worlds of sleep (O arching strands of song!)---
21 Onward and up the crystal-flooded aisle
22 White tempest nets file upward, upward ring
23 With silver terraces the humming spars,
24 The loft of vision, palladium helm of stars.
25 Sheerly the eyes, like seagulls stung with rime---
26 Slit and propelled by glistening fins of light---
27 Pick biting way up towering looms that press
28 Sidelong with flight of blade on tendon blade
29 ---Tomorrows into yesteryear---and link
30 What cipher-script of time no traveller reads
[Page 106 ]
31 But who, through smoking pyres of love and death,
32 Searches the timeless laugh of mythic spears.
33 Like hails, farewells---up planet-sequined heights
34 Some trillion whispering hammers glimmer Tyre:
35 Serenely, sharply up the long anvil cry
36 Of inchling aeons silence rivets Troy.
37 And you, aloft there---Jason! hesting Shout!
38 Still wrapping harness to the swarming air!
39 Silvery the rushing wake, surpassing call,
40 Beams yelling Aeolus! splintered in the straits!
41 From gulfs unfolding, terrible of drums,
42 Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, tensely spare---
43 Bridge, lifting night to cycloramic crest
44 Of deepest day---O Choir, translating time
45 Into what multitudinous Verb the suns
46 And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast
47 In myriad syllables,---Psalm of Cathay!
48 O Love, thy white, pervasive Paradigm...!
49 We left the haven hanging in the night---
50 Sheened harbor lanterns backward fled the keel.
51 Pacific here at time\'s end, bearing corn,---
52 Eyes stammer through the pangs of dust and steel.
53 And still the circular, indubitable frieze
54 Of heaven\'s meditation, yoking wave
55 To kneeling wave, one song devoutly binds---
56 The vernal strophe chimes from deathless strings!
57 O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
58 The agile precincts of the lark\'s return;
59 Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
60 In single chrysalis the many twain,---
[Page 107 ]
61 Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow
62 And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom---
63 Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time\'s realm
64 As love strikes clear direction for the helm.
65 Swift peal of secular light, intrinsic Myth
66 Whose fell unshadow is death\'s utter wound,---
67 O River-throated---iridescently upborne
68 Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins;
69 With white escarpments swinging into light,
70 Sustained in tears the cities are endowed
71 And justified conclamant with ripe fields
72 Revolving through their harvests in sweet torment.
73 Forever Deity\'s glittering Pledge, O Thou
74 Whose canticle fresh chemistry assigns
75 To wrapt inception and beatitude,---
76 Always through blinding cables, to our joy,
77 Of thy white seizure springs the prophecy:
78 Always through spiring cordage, pyramids
79 Of silver sequel, Deity\'s young name
80 Kinetic of white choiring wings ... ascends.
81 Migrations that must needs void memory,
82 Inventions that cobblestone the heart,---
83 Unspeakable Thou Bridge to Thee, O Love.
84 Thy pardon for this history, whitest Flower,
85 O Answerer of all,---Anemone,---
86 Now while thy petals spend the suns about us, hold---
87 (O Thou whose radiance doth inherit me)
88 Atlantis,---hold thy floating singer late!
89 So to thine Everpresence, beyond time,
90 Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star
[Page 108 ]
91 That bleeds infinity---the orphic strings,
92 Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge:
93 ---One Song, one Bridge of Fire! Is it Cathay,
94 Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring
95 The serpent with the eagle in the leaves ...?
96 Whispers antiphonal in azure swing.
[Page 109 ]作者: 王敖 时间: 2007-8-4 13:22
[Page 109 ]
KEY WEST
An Island Sheaf
[End note: 8Kb]
Epigraph
The starry floor,
The wat\'ry shore,
Is given thee \'til the break of day.
---BLAKE
[Page 111 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: O CARIB ISLE! [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 The tarantula rattling at the lily\'s foot
2 Across the feet of the dead, laid in white sand
3 Near the coral beach---nor zigzag fiddle crabs
4 Side-stilting from the path (that shift, subvert
5 And anagrammatize your name---No, nothing here
6 Below the palsy that one eucalyptus lifts
7 In wrinkled shadows---mourns.
8 And yet suppose
9 I count these nacreous frames of tropic death,
10 Brutal necklaces of shells around each grave
11 Squared off so carefully. Then
12 To the white sand I may speak a name, fertile
13 Albeit in a stranger tongue. Tree names, flower names
14 Deliberate, gainsay death\'s brittle crypt. Meanwhile
15 The wind that knots itself in one great death---
16 Coils and withdraws. So syllables want breath.
17 But where is the Captain of this doubloon isle
18 Without a turnstile? Who but catchword crabs
19 Patrols the dry groins of the underbrush?
20 What man, or What
21 Is Commissioner of mildew throughout the ambushed senses?
22 His Carib mathematics web the eyes\' baked lenses!
23 Under the poinciana, of a noon or afternoon
24 Let fiery blossoms clot the light, render my ghost
25 Sieved upward, white and black along the air
26 Until it meets the blue\'s comedian host.
27 Let not the pilgrim see himself again
28 For slow evisceration bound like those huge terrapin
29 Each daybreak on the wharf, their brine caked eyes;
[Page 112 ]
30 ---Spiked, overturned; such thunder in their strain!
31 And clenched beaks coughing for the surge again!
32 Slagged of the hurricane---I, cast within its flow,
33 Congeal by afternoons here, satin and vacant.
34 You have given me the shell, Satan,---carbonic amulet
35 Sere of the sun exploded in the sea.
[Page 113 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE MERMEN [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
And if
Thy banished trunk be found in our dominions---
KING LEAR
1 Buddhas and engines serve us undersea;
2 Though why they bide here, only hell that\'s sacked
3 Of every blight and ingenuity---
4 Can solve.
5 The Cross alone has flown the wave.
6 But since the Cross sank, much that\'s warped and cracked
7 Has followed in its name, has heaped its grave.
8 Oh---
9 Gallows and guillotines to hail the sun
10 And smoking wracks for penance when day\'s done!
11 No---
12 Leave us, you idols of Futurity---alone,
13 Here where we finger moidores of spent grace
14 And ponder the bright stains that starred this Throne
15 ---This Cross, agleam still with a human Face!
[Page 114 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: TO THE CLOUD JUGGLER [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
In Memoriam: Harry Crosby
1 What you may cluster \'round the knees of space
2 We hold in vision only, asking trace
3 Of districts where cliff, sea and palm advance
4 The falling wonder of a rainbow\'s trance.
5 Your light lifts whiteness into virgin azure ...
6 Disclose your lips, O Sun, nor long demure
7 With snore of thunder, crowding us to bleed
8 The green preëmption of the deep seaweed.
9 You, the rum-giver to that slide-by-night---,
10 The moon\'s best lover,---guide us by a sleight
11 Of quarts to faithfuls---surely smuggled home---
12 As you raise temples fresh from basking foam.
13 Expose vaunted validities that yawn
14 Past pleasantries ... Assert the ripened dawn
15 As you have yielded balcony and room
16 Or tempests---in a silver, floating plume.
17 Wrap us and lift us; drop us then, returned
18 Like water, undestroyed,---like mist, unburned ...
19 But do not claim a friend like him again,
20 Whose arrow must have pierced you beyond pain.
[Page 115 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE MANGO TREE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Let them return, saying you blush again for the great
2 Great-grandmother. It\'s all like Christmas.
3 When you sprouted Paradise a discard of chewing-gum
4 took place. Up jug to musical, hanging jug just gay spiders
5 yoked you first,---silking of shadows good underdrawers for
6 owls.
7 First-plucked before and since the Flood, old hypno-
8 tisms wrench the golden boughs. Leaves spatter dawn from
9 emerald cloud-sprockets. Fat final prophets with lean ban-
10 dits crouch: and dusk is close
11 under your noon,
12 you Sun-heap, whose
13 ripe apple-lanterns gush history, recondite lightnings, irised.
14 O mister Señor
15 missus Miss
16 Mademoiselle
17 with baskets
18 Maggy, come on
[Page 116 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: ISLAND QUARRY [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Square sheets---they saw the marble only into
2 Flat prison slabs there at the marble quarry
3 At the turning of the road around the roots of the
4 mountain
5 Where the straight road would seem to ply below the
6 stone, that fierce
7 Profile of marble spiked with yonder
8 Palms against the sunset\'s towering sea, and maybe
9 Against mankind. It is at times---
10 In dusk, as though this island lifted, floated
11 In Indian baths. At Cuban dusk the eyes
12 Walking the straight road toward thunder---
13 This dry road silvering toward the shadow of the
14 quarry
15 ---It is at times as though the eyes burned hard and glad
16 And did not take the goat path quivering to the right,
17 Wide of the mountain---thence to tears and sleep---
18 But went on into marble that does not weep.
[Page 117 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: OLD SONG [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Thy absence overflows the rose,---
2 From every petal gleam
3 Such words as it were vain to close,
4 Such tears as crowd the dream.
5 So eyes that mind thee fair and gone,
6 Bemused at waking, spend
7 On skies that gild thy remote dawn
8 More hopes than here attend.
9 The burden of the rose will fade
10 Sped in the spectrum\'s kiss.
11 But here the thorn in sharpened shade
12 Weathers all loneliness.
[Page 118 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE IDIOT [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Sheer over to the other side,---for see---
2 The boy straggling under those mimosas, daft
3 With squint lanterns in his head, and it\'s likely
4 Fumbling his sex. That\'s why those children laughed
5 In such infernal circles round his door
6 Once when he shouted, stretched in ghastly shape.
7 I hurried by. But back from the hot shore
8 Passed him again ... He was alone, agape;
9 One hand dealt out a kite string, a tin can
10 The other tilted, peeled end clamped to eye.
11 That kite aloft---you should have watched him scan
12 Its course, though he\'d clapped midnight to noon sky!
13 And since, through these hot barricades of green,
14 A Dios gracias, grac---I\'ve heard his song
15 Above all reason lifting, halt serene---
16 My trespass vision shrinks to face his wrong.
[Page 119 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: A NAME FOR ALL [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Moonmoth and grasshopper that flee our page
2 And still wing on, untarnished of the name
3 We pinion to your bodies to assuage
4 Our envy of your freedom---we must maim
5 Because we are usurpers, and chagrined---
6 And take the wing and scar it in the hand.
7 Names we have, even, to clap on the wind;
8 But we must die, as you, to understand.
9 I dreamed that all men dropped their names, and sang
10 As only they can praise, who build their days
11 With fin and hoof, with wing and sweetened fang
12 Struck free and holy in one Name always.
[Page 120 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: BACARDI SPREADS THE EAGLE\'S WING [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 "ablo and Pedro, and black Serafin
2 Bought a launch last week. It might as well
3 Have been made of---well, say paraffin,---
4 That thin and blistered ... just a rotten shell.
5 "Hell! out there among the barracudas
6 Their engine stalled. No oars, and leaks
7 Oozing a-plenty. They sat like baking Buddhas.
8 Luckily the Cayman schooner streaks
9 "By just in time, and lifts \'em high and dry ...
10 They\'re back now on that mulching job at Pepper\'s.
11 "Yes, patent-leather shoes hot enough to fry
12 Anyone but these native high-steppers!"
[Page 121 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: IMPERATOR VICTUS [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Big guns again.
2 No speakee well
3 But plain.
4 Again, again---
5 And they shall tell
6 The Spanish Main
7 The Dollar from the Cross.
8 Big guns again.
9 But peace to thee,
10 Andean brain.
11 Again, again---
12 Peace from his Mystery
13 The King of Spain,
14 That defunct boss.
15 Big guns again,
16 Atahualpa,
17 Imperator Inca---
18 Slain.
[Page 122 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: ROYAL PALM [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
For Grace Hart Crane
1 Green rustlings, more-than-regal charities
2 Drift coolly from that tower of whispered light.
3 Amid the noontide\'s blazed asperities
4 I watched the sun\'s most gracious anchorite
5 Climb up as by communings, year on year
6 Uneaten of the earth or aught earth holds,
7 And the grey trunk, that\'s elephantine, rear
8 Its frondings sighing in aetherial folds.
9 Forever fruitless, and beyond that yield
10 Of sweat the jungle presses with hot love
11 And tendril till our deathward breath is sealed---
12 It grazes the horizons, launched above
13 Mortality---ascending emerald-bright,
14 A fountain at salute, a crown in view---
15 Unshackled, casual of its azured height
16 As though it soared suchwise through heaven too.
[Page 123 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE AIR PLANT
Grand Cayman [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 This tuft that thrives on saline nothingness,
2 Inverted octopus with heavenward arms
3 Thrust patching from a palm-bole hard by the cove---
4 A bird almost---of almost bird alarms,
5 Is pulmonary to the wind that jars
6 Its tentacles, horrific in their lurch.
7 The lizard\'s throat, held bloated for a fly,
8 Balloons but warily from this throbbing perch.
9 The needles and hack-saws of cactus bleed
10 A milk of earth when stricken off the stalk;
11 But this,---defenseless, thornless, sheds no blood,
12 Almost no shadow---but the air\'s thin talk.
13 Angelic Dynamo! Ventriloquist of the Blue!
14 While beachward creeps the shark-swept Spanish Main
15 By what conjunctions do the winds appoint
16 Its apotheosis, at last---the hurricane!
[Page 124 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE HURRICANE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
7 Rescindeth flesh from bone
8 To quivering whittlings thinned---
9 Swept---whistling straw! Battered,
10 Lord, e\'en boulders now out-leap
11 Rock sockets, levin-lathered!
12 Nor, Lord, may worm out-creep
13 Thy drum\'s gambade, its plunge abscond!
14 Lord God, while summits crashing
15 Whip sea-kelp screaming on blond
16 Sky-seethe, high heaven dashing---
17 Thou ridest to the door, Lord!
18 Thou bidest wall nor floor, Lord!
[Page 125 ]
KEY WEST
Folder Subsection
[Page 126 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: KEY WEST [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Here has my salient faith annealed me.
2 Out of the valley, past the ample crib
3 To skies impartial, that do not disown me
4 Nor claim me, either, by Adam\'s spine---nor rib.
5 The oar plash, and the meteorite\'s white arch
6 Concur with wrist and bicep. In the moon
7 That now has sunk I strike a single march
8 To heaven or hades---to an equally frugal noon.
9 Because these millions reap a dead conclusion
10 Need I presume the same fruit of my bone
11 As draws them towards a doubly mocked confusion
12 Of apish nightmares into steel-strung stone?
13 O, steel and stone! But gold was, scarcity before.
14 And here is water, and a little wind....
15 There is no breath of friends and no more shore
16 Where gold has not been sold and conscience tinned.
[Page 127 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: ---AND BEES OF PARADISE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 I had come all the way here from the sea,
2 Yet met the wave again between your arms
3 Where cliff and citadel---all verily
4 Dissolved within a sky of beacon forms---
5 Sea gardens lifted rainbow-wise through eyes
6 I found.
7 Yes, tall, inseparably our days
8 Pass sunward. We have walked the kindled skies
9 Inexorable and girded with your praise,
10 By the dove filled, and bees of Paradise.
[Page 128 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: TO EMILY DICKINSON [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 You who desired so much---in vain to ask---
2 Yet fed your hunger like an endless task,
3 Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest---
4 Achieved that stillness ultimately best,
5 Being, of all, least sought for: Emily, hear!
6 O sweet, dead Silencer, most suddenly clear
7 When singing that Eternity possessed
8 And plundered momently in every breast;
9 ---Truly no flower yet withers in your hand.
10 The harvest you descried and understand
11 Needs more than wit to gather, love to bind.
12 Some reconcilement of remotest mind---
13 Leaves Ormus rubyless, and Ophir chill.
14 Else tears heap all within one clay-cold hill.
[Page 129 ]作者: 王敖 时间: 2007-8-4 13:22
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: MOMENT FUGUE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 The syphillitic selling violets calmly
2 and daisies
3 By the subway news-stand knows
4 how hyacinths
5 This April morning offers
6 hurriedly
7 In bunches sorted freshly---
8 and bestows
9 On every purchaser
10 (of heaven perhaps)
11 His eyes---
12 like crutches hurtled against glass
13 Fall mute and sudden (dealing change
14 for lilies)
15 Beyond the roses that no flesh can pass.
[Page 130 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: BY NILUS ONCE I KNEW ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Some old Egyptian joke is in the air,
2 Dear lady---the poet said---release your hair;
3 Come, search the marshes for a friendly bed
4 Or let us bump heads in some lowly shed.
5 An old Egyptian jest has cramped the tape.
6 The keyboard no more offers an escape
7 From the sweet jeopardy of Anthony\'s plight:
8 You\'ve overruled my typewriter tonight.
9 Decisive grammar given unto queens,---
10 An able text, more motion than machines
11 Have levers for,---stampede it with fresh type
12 From twenty alphabets---we\'re still unripe!
13 This hieroglyph is no dumb, deaf mistake.
14 It knows its way through India---tropic shake!
15 It\'s Titicaca till we\'ve trod it through,
16 And then it pleads again, "I wish I knew".
[Page 131 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: TO SHAKESPEARE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Through torrid entrances, past icy poles
2 A hand moves on the page! Who shall again
3 Engrave such hazards as thy might controls---
4 Conflicting, purposeful yet outcry vain
5 Of all our days, being pilot,---tempest, too!
6 Sheets that mock lust and thorns that scribble hate
7 Are lifted from torn flesh with human rue,
8 And laughter, burnished brighter than our fate
9 Thou wieldest with such tears that every faction
10 Swears high in Hamlet\'s throat, and devils throng
11 Where angels beg for doom in ghast distraction
12 ---And fail, both! Yet thine Ariel holds his song:
13 And that serenity that Prospero gains
14 Is justice that has cancelled earthly chains.
[Page 133 ]
POEMS UNCOLLECTED BUT PUBLISHED BY CRANE
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[Page 135 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: C 33 [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 He has woven rose-vines
2 About the empty heart of night,
3 And vented his long mellowed wines
4 Of dreaming on the desert white
5 With searing sophistry.
6 And he tented with far truths he would form
7 The transient bosoms from the thorny tree.
8 O Materna! to enrich thy gold head
9 And wavering shoulders with a new light shed
10 From penitence, must needs bring pain,
11 And with it song of minor, broken strain.
12 But you who hear the lamp whisper through night
13 Can trace paths tear-wet, and forget all blight.
[Page 136 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: OCTOBER-NOVEMBER [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Indian-summer-sun
2 With crimson feathers whips away the mists;
3 Dives through the filter of trellises
4 And gilds the silver on the blotched arbor-seats.
5 Now gold and purple scintillate
6 On trees that seem dancing
7 In delirium;
8 Then the moon
9 In a mad orange flare
10 Floods the grape-hung night.
[Page 137 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE HIVE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Up the chasm-walls of my bleeding heart
2 Humanity pecks, claws, sobs, and climbs;
3 Up the inside, and over every part
4 Of the hive of the world that is my heart.
5 And of all the sowing, and all the tear-tendering,
6 And reaping, have mercy and love issued forth.
7 Mercy, white milk, and honey, gold love---
8 And I watch, and say, "These the anguish are worth."
[Page 138 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: FEAR [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 The host, he says that all is well,
2 And the fire-wood glow is bright;
3 The food has a warm and tempting smell,---
4 But on the window licks the night.
5 Pile on the logs.... Give me your hands,
6 Friends! No,---it is not fright....
7 But hold me ... somewhere I heard demands....
8 And on the window licks the night.
[Page 139 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: ANNUNCIATIONS [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 The anxious milk-blood in the veins of the earth,
2 That strives long and quiet to sever the girth
3 Of greenery.... Below the roots, a quickening quiver
4 Aroused by some light that had sensed,---ere the shiver
5 5 Of the first moth\'s descent,---day;s predestiny....
6 The sound of a dove\'s flight waved over the lawn....
7 The moans of travail of one dearest beside me....
8 Then high cries from great chasms of chaos outdrawn....
9 Hush! these things were all heard before dawn.
[Page 140 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: ECHOES [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1
1 Slivers of rain upon the pane,
2 Jade-green with sunlight, melt and flow
3 Upward again:---they leave no stain
4 Of all the storm an hour ago.
2
5 Over the hill a last cloud dips
6 And disappears, and I should go
7 As silently but that your lips
8 Are warmer with a redder glow.
3
9 Fresh and fragile, your arms now
10 Are circles of cool roses,---so....
11 In opal pools beneath your brow
12 I dream we quarreled long, long ago.
[Page 141 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE BATHERS [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Two ivory women by a milky sea;---
2 The dawn, a shell\'s pale lining restlessly
3 Shimmering over a black mountain-spear:---
4 A dreamer might see these, and wake to hear,
5 But there is no sound,---not even a bird-note;
6 Only simple ripples flaunt, and stroke, and float,---
7 Flat lily petals to the sea\'s white throat.
8 They say that Venus shot through foam to light,
9 But they are wrong.... Ere man was given sight
10 She came in such still water, and so nursed
11 In silence, beauty blessed and beauty cursed.
[Page 142 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: MODERN CRAFT [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Though I have touched her flesh of moons,
2 Still she sits gestureless and mute,
3 Drowning cool pearls in alcohol.
4 O blameless shyness;---innocence dissolute!
5 She hazards jet; wears tiger-lilies;---
6 And bolts herself within a jewelled belt.
7 Too many palms have grazed her shoulders:
8 Surely she must have felt.
9 Ophelia had such eyes; but she
10 Even, sank in love and choked with flowers.
11 This burns and is not burnt.... My modern love were
12 Charred at a stake in younger times than ours.
[Page 143 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: CARMEN DE BOHEME [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Sinuously winding through the room
2 On smokey tongues of sweetened cigarettes,---
3 Plaintive yet proud the cello tones resume
4 The andante of smooth hopes and lost regrets.
5 Bright peacocks drink from flame-pots by the wall,
6 Just as absinthe-sipping women shiver through
7 With shimmering blue from the bowl in Circe\'s hall.
8 Their brown eyes blacken, and the blue drop hue.
9 The andante quivers with crescendo\'s start,
10 And dies on fire\'s birth in each man\'s heart.
11 The tapestry betrays a finger through
12 The slit, soft-pulling:---and music follows cue.
13 There is a sweep,---a shattering,---a choir
14 Disquieting of barbarous fantasy.
15 The pulse is in the ears, the heart is higher,
16 And stretches up through mortal eyes to see.
17 Carmen! Akimbo arms and smouldering eyes;---
18 Carmen! Bestirring hope and lipping eyes;---
19 Carmen whirls, and music swirls and dips.
20 "Carmen!" comes awed from wine-hot lips.
21 Finale leaves in silence to replume
22 Bent wings, and Carmen with her flaunts through the gloom
23 Of whispering tapestry, brown with old fringe:---
24 The winers leave too, and the small lamps twinge.
25 Morning: and through the foggy city gate
26 A gypsy wagon wiggles, striving straight.
27 And some dream still of Carmen\'s mystic face,---
28 Yellow, pallid, like ancient lace.
[Page 144 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: EXILE
(after the Chinese) [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 My hands have not touched pleasure since your hands,---
2 No,---nor my lips freed laughter since \'farewell\',
3 And with the day, distance again expands
4 Voiceless between us, as an uncoiled shell.
5 Yet love endures, though starving and alone.
6 A dove\'s wings cling about my heart each night
7 With surging gentleness, and the blue stone
8 Set in the tryst-ring has but worn more bright.
[Page 145 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: POSTSCRIPT [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Though now but marble are the marble urns,
2 Though fountains droop in waning light and pain
3 Glitters on the edges of wet ferns,
4 I should not dare to let you in again.
5 Mine is a world foregone though not yet ended,---
6 An imagined garden grey with sundered boughs
7 And broken branches, wistful and unmended,
8 And mist that is more constant than all vows.
[Page 146 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: FORGETFULNESS [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Forgetfulness is like a song
2 That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
3 Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
4 Outspread and motionless,---
5 A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.
6 Forgetfulness is rain at night,
7 Or an old house in a forest,---or a child.
8 Forgetfulness is white,---white as a blasted tree,
9 And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
10 Or bury the Gods.
11 I can remember much forgetfulness.
[Page 147 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: TO PORTAPOVITCH
(du Ballet Russe) [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Vault on the opal carpet of the sun,
2 Barbaric Prince Igor:---or, blind Pierrot,
3 Despair until the moon by tears be won:---
4 Or, Daphnis, move among the bees with Chloe.
5 Release,---dismiss the passion from your arms.
6 More real than life, the gestures you have spun
7 Haunt the blank stage with lingering alarms,
8 Though silent as your sandals, danced undone.
[Page 148 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: LEGENDE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 The tossing loneliness of many nights
2 Rounds off my memory of her.
3 Like a shell surrendered to evening sands,
4 Yet called adrift again at every dawn,
5 She has become a pathos,---
6 Waif of the tides.
7 The sand and sea have had their way,
8 And moons of spring and autumn,---
9 All, save I.
10 And even my vision will be erased
11 As a cameo the waves claim again.
[Page 149 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: INTERIOR [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 It sheds a shy solemnity,
2 This lamp in our poor room.
3 O grey and gold amenity,---
4 Silence and gentle gloom!
5 Wide from the world, a stolen hour
6 We claim, and none may know
7 How love blooms like a tardy flower
8 Here in the day\'s after-glow.
9 And even should the world break in
10 With jealous threat and guile,
11 The world, at last, must bow and win
12 Our pity and a smile.
[Page 150 ]作者: 王敖 时间: 2007-8-4 13:22
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: PORPHYRO IN AKRON [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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I
1 Greeting the dawn,
2 A shift of rubber workers presses down
3 South Main.
4 With the stubbornness of muddy water
5 It dwindles at each cross-line
6 Until you feel the weight of many cars
7 North-bound, and East and West,
8 Absorbing and conveying wearines,---
9 Rumbling over the hills.
10 Akron, "high place",---
11 A bunch of smoke-ridden hills
12 Among rolling Ohio hills.
13 The dark-skinned Greeks grin at each other
14 In the streets and alleys.
15 The Greek grins and fights with the Swede,---
16 And the Fjords and the Aegean are remembered.
17 The plough, the sword,
18 The trowel,---and the monkey wrench!
19 O City, your axles need not the oil of song.
20 I will whisper words to myself
21 And put them in my pockets.
22 I will go and pitch quoits with old men
23 In the dust of a road.
[Page 151 ]
II
24 And some of them "will be Americans",
25 Using the latest ice-box and buying Fords;
26 And others,---
27 I remember one Sunday noon,
28 Harry and I, "the gentlemen",---seated around
29 A table of raisin-jack and wine, our host
30 Setting down a glass and saying,---
31 "One month,---I go back rich.
32 I ride black horse.... Have many sheep."
33 And his wife, like a mountain, coming in
34 With four tiny black-eyed girls around her
35 Twinkling like little Christmas trees.
36 And some Sunday fiddlers,
37 Roumanian business men,
38 Played ragtime and dances before the door,
39 And we overpayed them because we felt like it.
[Page 152 ]
III
40 Pull down the hotel counterpane
41 And hitch yourself up to your book.
42 "Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
43 And threw warm gules on Madeleine\'s fair breast,
44 As down she knelt for heaven\'s grace and boon..."
45 "Connais tu le pays...?"
46 Your mother sang that in a stuffy parlour
47 One summer day in a little town
48 Where you had started to grow.
49 And you were outside as soon as you
50 Could get away from the company
51 To find the only rose on the bush
52 In the front yard.......
53 But look up, Porphyro,---your toes
54 Are ridiculously tapping
55 The spindles at the foot of the bed.
56 The stars are drowned in a slow rain,
57 And a hash of noises is slung up from the street.
58 You ought, really, to try to sleep,
60 Even though, in this town, poetry\'s a
60 Bedroom occupation.
[Page 153 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: A PERSUASION [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 If she waits late at night
2 Hearing the wind,
3 It is to gather kindnesses
4 No world can offer.
5 She has drawn her hands away.
6 The wind plays andantes
7 Of lost hopes and regrets,---
8 And yet is kind.
9 Below the wind,
10 Waiting for morning
11 The hills lie curved and blent
12 As now her heart and mind.
[Page 154 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932 / Laforgue, Jules, 1860-1887 (orig.): THREE LOCUTIONS DES PIERROTS
from the French of Jules Laforgue [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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I
1 Your eyes, those pools with soft rushes,
2 O prodigal and wholly dilatory lady,
3 Come now, when will they restore me
4 The orient moon of my dapper affections?
5 For imminent is that moment when,
6 Because of your perverse austerities,
7 My crisp soul will be flooded by a languor
8 Bland as the wide gaze of a Newfoundland.
9 Ah, madame! truly it\'s not right
10 When one isn\'t the real Gioconda,
11 To adaptate her methods and deportment
12 For snaring the poor world in a blue funk.
II
13 Ah! the divine infatuation
14 That I nurse for Cydalise
15 Now that she has fled the capture
16 Of my lunar sensibility!
17 True, I nibble at despondencies
18 Among the flowers of her domain
19 To the sole end of discovering
20 What is her unique propensity!
21 ---Which is to be mine, you say?
22 Alas, you know how much I oppose
23 A stiff denial to postures
24 That seem too much impromptu.
[Page 155 ]
III
25 Ah! without the moon, what white nights,
26 What nightmares rich with ingenuity!
27 Don\'t I see your white swans there?
28 Doesn\'t someone come to turn the knob?
29 And it\'s your fault that I\'m this way.
30 That my conscience sees double,
31 And my heart fishes in troubled water
32 For Eve, Gioconda, and Dalila.
33 Oh, by the infinite circumflex
34 Of the archbeam of my cross-legged labours,
35 Come now,---appease me just a little
36 With the why-and-wherefore of Your Sex!
[Page 156 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE GREAT WESTERN PLAINS [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 The little voices of prairie dogs
2 are tireless ...
3 They will give three hurrahs
4 alike to stage, equestrian, and pullman,
5 and all unstintingly as to the moon.
6 And Fifi\'s bows and poodle ease
7 whirl by them centred in the lap
8 of Lottie Honeydew, movie queen,
9 toward lawyers and Nevada.
10 And how much more they cannot see!
11 Alas, there is so little time,
12 the world moves by so fast these days!
13 Burrowing in silk is not their way---
14 and yet they know the tomahawk.
15 Indeed, old memories come back to life;
16 pathetic yelps have sometimes greeted
17 noses pressed against the glass.
[Page 157 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: AMERICA\'S PLUTONIC ECSTASIES [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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with homage to E. E. Cummings
1 preferring laxatives to wine
2 all america is saying
3 "how are my bowels today?" and
4 feeling them in every way and
5 peering
6 for the one goat (unsqueezable)
7 that kicked out long ago---
8 or, even thinking
9 of something---Oh!
10 unbelievably---Oh!
11 HEADY!---those aromatic LEMONS!
12 that make your colored syrup fairly
13 PULSE!---yes, PULSE!
14 the nation\'s lips are thin and fast
15 with righteousness. Yet if
16 memory serves there is still
17 catharsis from gin-daisies as well as
18 maiden-hair ferns, and the BRONX
19 doesn\'t stink at all
20 These
21 and other natural grammarians are ab-
22 so-loot-lee necessary
23 for a FREE-ER PASSAGE---(NOT
24 to india, o ye faithful,
25 but a little BACK DOOR DIGNITY)
[Page 158 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: INTERLUDIUM
To "La Montagne" by Lachaise [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Thy time is thee to wend
2 with languor such as gains
3 immensity in gathered grace; the arms
4 to spread; the hands to yield their shells
5 and fostering
6 thyself, bestow to thee
7 illimitable and unresigned
8 (no instinct flattering vainly now)
9 Thyself
10 that heavens climb to measure, thus
11 unfurling thee untried,---until
12 from sleep forbidden now and wide
13 partitions in thee---goes
14 communicant and speeding new
15 the cup again wide from thy throat to spend
16 those streams and slopes untenanted thou
17 hast known.... And blithe
18 Madonna, natal to thy yielding
19 still subsist I, wondrous as
20 from thine open dugs shall still the sun
21 again round one more fairest day.
[Page 159 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: MARCH [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Awake to the cold light
2 of wet wind running
3 twigs in tremors, Walls
4 are naked. Twilights raw---
5 and when the sun taps steeples
6 their glistenings dwindle
7 upward ...
8 March
9 slips along the ground
10 like a mouse under pussy---
11 willows, a little hungry.
12 The vagrant ghost of winter,
13 is it this that keeps the chimney
14 busy still? For something still
15 nudges shingles and windows:
16 but waveringly,---this ghost,
17 this slate-eyed saintly wraith
18 of winter wanes
19 and knows its waning.
[Page 160 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE BROKEN TOWER [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn
2 Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
3 Of a spent day---to wander the cathedral lawn
4 From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.
5 Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
6 Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
7 Antiphonal carillons launched before
8 The stars are caught and hived in the sun\'s ray?
9 The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
10 And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
11 Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
12 Of broken intervals ... And I, their sexton slave!
13 Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
14 The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
15 Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles outleaping---
16 O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!...
17 And so it was I entered the broken world
18 To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
19 An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
20 But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
21 My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
22 Of that tribunal monarch of the air
23 Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
24 In wounds pledged once to hope,---cleft to despair?
25 The steep encroachments of my blood left me
26 No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
27 As flings the question true?)---or is it she
28 Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?---
[Page 161 ]
29 And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
30 My veins recall and add, revived and sure
31 The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
32 What I hold healed, original now, and pure ...
33 And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
34 (Not stone can jacket heaven)---but slip
35 Of pebbles,---visible wings of silence sown
36 In azure circles, widening as they dip
37 The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye
38 That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower ...
39 The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
40 Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.
[Page 163 ]
POEMS UNPUBLISHED BY CRANE
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[Page 165 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: A SONG FOR HAPPY FEAST DAYS [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 A song for happy feast days,
2 A song for fortune\'s spurns,
3 In merry and consoling lays---
4 The cheery songs of Bobbie Burns.
[Page 166 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: SONNET [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Ere elfish Night shall sift another day
2 Hope-broken \'neath her ebon scepter\'s keep,
3 Or the fainting soul\'s last flames all trembling creep
4 White-taper-like, and paler, pulse away,
5 Then shalt thou come, O Saint, in magic sway
6 Of midnight\'s purple organ-breath, and sweep
7 Brave echoes from the spooming coast to steep,
8 Blue heights where cone-wood calls near summits spray
9 Frost-fringes through thine octaves ... And from shades
10 Of moon-fled valleys, there shall rise a rift,
11 The supplication of all earth, mute serenades,
12 Whispering, "Cecilia, Saint, leave us thy gift."
13 And sleep shalt thou bestow, the final song,
14 And Time shall set the morning stars adrift.
[Page 167 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE MOTH THAT GOD MADE BLIND [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Among cocoa-nut palms of a far oasis,
2 Conceived in the light of Arabian moons,
3 There are butterflies born in mosaic date-vases,
4 That emerge black and vermeil from yellow cocoons.
5 Some say that for sweetness they cannot see far,---
6 That their land is too gorgeous to free their eyes wide
7 To horizons which knife-like would only mar
8 Their joy with a barren and steely tide---
9 That they only can see when their moon limits vision,
10 Their mother, the Moon, marks a halo of light
11 On their own small oasis, ray-cut, an incision,
12 Where are set all the myriad jewelleries of night.
13 So they sleep in the shade of black palm-bark at noon,
14 Blind only in day, but remembering that soon
15 She will flush their hid wings in the evening to blaze
16 Countless rubies and tapers in the oasis\' blue haze.
17 But over one moth\'s eyes were tissues at birth
18 Too multiplied even to center his gaze
19 On that circle of paradise cool in the night;---
20 Never came light through that honey-thick glaze.
[Page 168 ]
21 And had not his pinions with signs mystical
22 And rings macrocosmic won envy as thrall,
23 They had scorned him, so humbly low, bound there and tied
24 At night like a grain of sand, futile and dried.
25 But once though, he learned of that span of his wings,---
26 The florescence, the power he felt bud at the time
27 When the others were blinded by all waking things;
28 And he ventured the desert,---his wings took the climb.
29 And lo, in that dawn he was pierroting over,---
30 Swinging in spirals round the fresh breasts of day.
31 The moat of the desert was melting from clover
32 To yellow,---to crystal,---a sea of white spray---
33 Till the sun, he still gyrating, shot out all white,---
34 Though a black god to him in a dizzying night;---
35 And without one cloud-car in that wide meshless blue
36 The sun saw a ruby brightening ever, that flew.
37 Seething and rounding in long streams of light
38 The heat led the moth up in octopus arms:
39 The honey-wax eyes could find no alarms,
40 But they burned thinly blind like an orange peeled white.
41 And the torrid hum of great wings was his song
42 When below him he saw what his whole race had shunned---
43 Great horizons and systems and shores all along
44 Which blue tides of cool moons were slow shaken and sunned.
[Page 169 ]
45 A little time only, for sight burned as deep
46 As his blindness before had frozen in Hell,
47 And his wings atom-withered,---gone,---left but a leap:---
48 To the desert,---back,---down,---still lonely he fell.
49 I have hunted long years for a spark in the sand;---
50 My eyes have hugged beauty and winged life\'s brief spell.
51 These things I have:---a withered hand;---
52 Dim eyes;---a tongue that cannot tell.
[Page 170 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: TO EARTH [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Be earnest, Earth,---and kind.
2 This flower that opened in the storm
3 Has fallen with the after-hush.
4 Be earnest, Earth,---and kind.
1 "Fall with me
2 Through the frigid stars:
3 Fall with me
4 Through the raving light:---
5 Sink
6 Where is no song
7 But only the white hair of aged winds.
8 Follow
9 Into utterness,
10 Into dizzying chaos,---
11 The eternal boiling chaos
12 Of my locks!
13 Behold thy lover,---
14 Stone!"
[Page 172 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: MEDITATION [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 I have drawn my hands away
2 Toward peace and the grey margins of the day.
3 The andante of vain hopes and lost regret
4 Falls like slow rain that whispers to forget,---
5 Like a song that neither questions nor replies
6 It laves with coolness tarnished lips and eyes.
7 I have drawn my hands away
8 At last to touch the ungathered rose. O stay,
9 Moment of dissolving happiness! Astir
10 Already in the sky, night\'s chorister
11 Has brushed a petal from the jasmine moon,
12 And the heron has passed by, alas, how soon!
13 I have drawn my hands away
14 Like ships for guidance in the lift and spray
15 Of stars that urge them toward an unknown goal.
16 Drift, O wakeful one, O restless soul,
17 Until the glittering white open hand
18 Of heaven thou shalt read and understand.
[Page 173 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: EPISODE OF HANDS [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 The unexpected interest made him flush.
2 Suddenly he seemed to forget the pain,---
3 Consented,---and held out
4 One finger from the others.
5 The gash was bleeding, and a shaft of sun
6 That glittered in and out among the wheels,
7 Fell lightly, warmly, down into the wound.
8 And as the fingers of the factory owner\'s son,
9 That knew a grip for books and tennis
10 As well as one for iron and leather,---
11 As his taut, spare fingers wound the gauze
12 Around the thick bed of the wound,
13 His own hands seemed to him
14 Like wings of butterflies
15 Flickering in sunlight over summer fields.
16 The knots and notches,---many in the wide
17 Deep hand that lay in his,---seemed beautiful.
18 They were like the marks of wild ponies\' play,---
19 Bunches of new green breaking a hard turf.
20 And factory sounds and factory thoughts
21 Were banished from him by that larger, quieter hand
22 That lay in his with the sun upon it.
23 And as the bandage knot was tightened
24 The two men smiled into each other\'s eyes.
[Page 174 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE BRIDGE OF ESTADOR
&&&&
An Impromptu, Aesthetic TIRADE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Walk high on the bridge of Estador,
2 No one has ever walked there before.
3 There is a lake, perhaps, with the sun
4 Lapped under it,---or the dun
5 Bellies and estuaries of warehouses,
6 Tied bundle-wise with cords of smoke.
7 Do not think too deeply, and you\'ll find
8 A soul, an element in it all.
9 How can you tell where beauty\'s to be found?
10 I have heard hands praised for what they made;
11 I have heard hands praised for line on line;
12 Yet a gash with sunlight jerking through
13 A mesh of belts down into it, made me think
14 I had never seen a hand before.
15 And the hand was thick and heavily warted.
16 High on the bridge of Estador
17 Where no one has ever been before,---
18 I do not know what you\'ll see,---your vision
19 May slumber yet in the moon, awaiting
20 Far consummations of the tides to throw
21 Clean on the shore some wreck of dreams....
22 But some are twisted with the love
23 Of things irreconcilable,---
24 The slant moon with the slanting hill:
[Page 175 ]
25 O Beauty\'s fool, though you have never
26 Seen them again, you won\'t forget.
27 Nor the Gods that danced before you
28 When your fingers spread among stars.
29 And you others,---follow your arches
30 To what corners of the sky they pull you to,---
31 The everlasting eyes of Pierrot,
32 Or, of Gargantua, the laughter.
[Page 176 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: AFTER JONAH [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 In my beginning was the memory, somehow
2 contradicting Jonah, that essential babe
3 of unbaptised digestion, being a nugget
4 to call pity on Jerusalem and on Nature, too.
5 We have his travels in the snare so widely
6 ruminated,---of how he stuck there, was reformed,
7 forgiven, also---
8 and belched back like a word to grace us all.
9 There is no settling tank in God. It must be borne
10 that even His bowels are too delicate to board
11 a sniping thief that has a pious beard.
12 We must hail back the lamb that went unsheared.
13 O sweet deep whale as ever reamed the sky
14 with high white gulfs of vapor, castigate
15 our sins, but be hospitable as Hell.
16 And keep me to the death like ambergris,
17 sealed up, and unforgiven in my cell.
[Page 177 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: EUCLID AVENUE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
To be or not to be---?
1 But so to be the denizen stingaree---
2 As stertorous as nations romanized may throw
3 Surveys by Maytimes slow.... Hexameters
4 Suspending jockstraps for gangsters while the pil---
5 Bland (grim)aces Plutarch\'s perch. And angles
6 Break in folds of crêpe that blackly drape
7 The broken door ... Crouch so. Amend
8 Then; and clinch.
9 Sweep....
10 Clean is that cloven Hoof. Then reap
11 Strain, clasp oblivion as though Chance
12 Could absent all answer save the chosen rant.
13 Stop now, as never, never. Speak
14 As telegrams continue, write, strike
15 Your scholarship (stop) through broken ribs; jail
16 (Stripe) answers Euclid. Einstein curves, but does not
17 Quail. Does Newton take the Eucharist on rail
18 Nor any boulevard no more? I say ...
19 For there are statues, shapes your use
20 Repeals. Youse use. You\'re prevalent,---prevail!
21 Youse
22 Food once more and souse, like all me under sail.
23 My friends, I never thought we\'d fail.
24 That dirty peacock\'s pride, once gory God\'s own story:
25 It didn\'t belong no more; no, never did glory
[Page 178 ]
26 Walk on Euclid Avenue, as didn\'t Wm.
27 Bleached or blacked, whichever \'twas. What milk
28 We\'ve put in blasted pigs! I says ... O, well---
29 But I say, what a swell chance, boys. No more
30 Cancers, jealousy, tenements or giblets! Death, my boys,
31 Nor blinkers either---
32 Four shots at who-knows-how---how
33 Many-it-was unsupervised
34 Grabbed right outa my mouth that final chew---
35 Right there on Euclid Avenue.
[Page 179 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: OF AN EVENING PULLING OFF A LITTLE EXPERIENCE
(with the english language) [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 by
2 NIGHTS
3 EEEEEECCCUUUMMMMMMIIINNGGGSSS (for short) 69
4 wrists web rythms
5 and the poke-
6 ,dot smile;
7 of Genevive
8 talks
9 back
10 i KNew,kneW my feet
11 ?go on) were an applesauce
12 part
13 of yoU belching POCHETTEkeepit
14 upyou s,uede
15 ballbearing
16 celery = grin
17 remind of-of la guerre
18 UM
19 Trimvirate (creamed dancing bitches)
20 corking with Helene, (exactly you make)
21 my perpendicularly crowdedPOCKets
22 smilepoke
23 ,,besides: which
24 April has
25 a
[Page 180 ]
26 word to say: classy )eh(!
27 while blundering fumbiguts gather accu
28 rate little, O-SO masturbations in/
29 to
30 fractions of heaven. Hold tight bless
31 worms trilling rimple flock to
32 sad iron
33 goats of
34 love-
35 semi-colon
36 piping (dash)
[Page 181 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: WHAT NOTS? [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 to chorus of:"O bury me not
2 In the lone prairie-ee,
3 Where the wild coyotes
4 Will how-ow-owl at me!"
5 What is a What Not
6 if what is not negates
7 what is not what
8 you thought it was ?
9 O berenberg not
10 in Laocoön trot---
11 No; what is not
12 esperanto may well be
13 Lessing to what
14 not Guthries
15 plus pot shot double-
16 double-you Williams:
17 so clams open not
18 to the naughty What Not !
19 What a lot of rot, not what
20 grandma was hot about, you
21 say: so
22 wot I too. But
23 what knots and dots
24 remind you of forget-
25 me-nots ?
[Page 182 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: IN A COURT [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 His hand changed in the kitchen
2 by the fire: she moved a little,
3 like wax against his gaze
4 that followed flame and transfusion,---
5 every spark meshed white, a part
6 of his most solemn appetite.
7 I looked into the kitchen where
8 they sat.
9 Breathless I was that peace should come
10 where fat is to be grasped and lean
11 is clenched,
12 and fingers are a teeth that taste
13 and smell.
[Page 183 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: WITH A PHOTOGRAPH TO ZELL, NOW BOUND FOR SPAIN [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 From Brooklyn Heights one sees the bay:
2 And, anchored at my window sill,
3 I\'ve often sat and watched all day
4 The boats stream by against the shrill
5 Manhattan skyline,---endlessly
6 Their mastheads filing out to sea.
7 And just so, as you see me here
8 (Though kodaked somewhat out of focus,
9 My eyes have still the proper locus)
10 I\'m flashing greetings to your pier,
11 Your ship, your auto-bus in France---
12 All things on which you glide or prance
13 Down into sunny Spain, dear Zell.
14 Good berths, good food and wine as well!
15 I hope to know these wishes a true
16 Forecasting. Let me hear from you.
17 Enclose some petals from a wall
18 Of roses in Castile, or maybe garden stall;
19 While I\'ll be waiting at this old address,
20 Dear Aunt, God-mother, Editress!
[Page 184 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: SUPPLICATION TO THE MUSES ON A TRYING DAY [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
"How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest,
The seagull\'s wings shall---"
1 Hold it in a high wind. The fender curving over the
2 breastplate, and all in high gear. I watched to see the
3 river rise. The forests had all given out their streams
4 and tributaries. When would the bones of De Soto come
5 down in the wild rinse? And when would Ponce de Leon
6 remember Hammerfest?... There were periods when the
7 salt-rising bread broke out all over me in heinous sores.
8 If you can\'t abuse a machine, why have it! Machines
9 are made for abuse.... Fool-proof! Human beings were never
10 jetted, conceived, articulated, ejected, nursed,
11 spanked, corrected, educated, harangued, married, divorced,
12 petted, emasculated, loved and damned, jailed and liberated,
13 besides being plastered, frightened and mangled, pickled
14 and strangled---THEY were never meant to be abused!
15 Thou art no more than Chinese to me, O Moon! A simian
16 chorus to you, and let your balls be nibbled by the flirt-
17 atious hauchinango. The tide would rise---and did. I held
18 the crupper by a lasso conscripted from white mice tails
19 spliced to the fore-top gallant. Old Mizzentop rose, but
20 all in vain. It was a wild night among the breakers and
21 the smooth racoons. All the pistols came dressed in white
22 lattice, winking as never before; but the prawns held out
23 till nearly daybreak,---simpering, simpering and equivocating.
24 By the time I reached Berlin---or was it Shanghai?---there
25 were no more stitches for wounds, nor tortoises for teles-
26 copes. "What a waste of eternity!" I exclaimed into the ear
27 of the most celebrated microphone you ever smashed. Then
28 the wind rose, and I strangled in the embraces of a derelict
29 aigrette.
[Page 185 ]
30 These dermatologists of Mozambique have got hold of me since.
31 They say my digits fidget, that I\'m but a follicle of my
32 former fratricide.... What shall I do? I
33 masticate firmly and bite off all my nails. I practise in-
34 vention / to the brink of intelligibility. I insult all my
35 friends and ride ostriches furiously across the Yukon, while
36 parrots berate me to the accompaniment of the most chaste
37 reticules. By all the mystery of Gomorrha, I ask, what can a
38 gaping gastronomist gather in such a gulch of simulation?!!
[Page 186 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: ETERNITY [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 After it was over, though still gusting balefully,
2 The old woman and I foraged some drier clothes
3 And left the house, or what was left of it;
4 Parts of the roof reached Yucatan, I suppose.
5 She almost---even then---got blown across lots
6 At the base of the mountain. But the town, the town!
7 Wires in the streets and Chinamen up and down
8 With arms in slings, plaster strewn dense with tiles,
9 And Cuban doctors, troopers, trucks, loose hens ...
10 The only building not sagging on its knees,
11 Fernandez\' Hotel, was requisitioned into pens
12 For cotted negroes, bandaged to be taken
13 To Havana on the first boat through. They groaned.
14 But was there a boat? By the wharf\'s old site you saw
15 Two decks unsandwiched, split sixty feet apart
16 And a funnel high and dry up near the park
17 Where a frantic peacock rummaged amid heaped cans.
18 No one seemed to be able to get a spark
19 From the world outside, but some rumor blew
20 That Havana, not to mention poor Batabanó,
21 Was halfway under water with fires
22 For some hours since---all wireless down
23 Of course, there too.
24 Back at the erstwhile house
25 We shoveled and sweated; watched the ogre sun
26 Blister the mountain, stripped now, bare of palm,
27 Everything---and lick the grass, as black as patent
28 Leather, which the timed white wind had glazed.
[Page 187 ]
29 Everything gone---or strewn in riddled grace---
30 Long tropic roots high in the air, like lace.
31 And somebody\'s mule steamed, swaying right by the pump,
32 Good God! as though his sinking carcass there
33 Were death predestined! You held your nose already
34 Along the roads, begging for buzzards, vultures ...
35 The mule stumbled, staggered. I somehow couldn\'t budge
36 To lift a stick for pity of his stupor.
37 For I
38 Remember still that strange gratuity of horses
39 ---One ours, and one, a stranger, creeping up with dawn
40 Out of the bamboo brake through howling, sheeted light
41 When the storm was dying. And Sarah saw them, too---
42 Sobbed, Yes, now---it\'s almost over. For they know;
43 The weather\'s in their noses. There\'s Don---but that one, white
44 ---I can\'t account for him! And true, he stood
45 Like a vast phantom maned by all that memoried night
46 Of screaming rain---Eternity!
47 Yet water, water!
48 I beat the dazed mule toward the road. He got that far
49 And fell dead or dying, but it didn\'t so much matter.
50 The morrow\'s dawn was dense with carrion hazes
51 Sliding everywhere. Bodies were rushed into graves
52 Without ceremony, while hammers pattered in town.
53 The roads were being cleared, injured brought in
54 And treated, it seemed. In due time
55 The President sent down a battleship that baked
56 Something like two thousand loaves on the way.
57 Doctors shot ahead from the deck in planes.
58 The fever was checked. I stood a long time in Mack\'s talking
59 New York with the gobs, Guantanamo, Norfolk,---
60 Drinking Bacardi and talking U.S.A.
[Page 188 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE SAD INDIAN [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Sad heart, the gymnast of inertia, does not count
2 Hours, days---and scarcely sun and moon---
3 The warp is in the woof---and his keen vision
4 Spells what his tongue has had---and only that---
5 How more?---but the lash, lost vantage---and the prison
6 His fathers took for granted ages since---and so he looms
7 Farther than his sun-shadow---farther than wings
8 ---Their shadows even---now can\'t carry him.
9 He does not know the new hum in the sky
10 And---backwards---is it thus the eagles fly?
[Page 189 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: HIEROGLYPHIC [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Did one look at what one saw
2 Or did one see what one looked At?
[Page 191 ]
INCOMPLETE WORKS
[Page 192 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THIS WAY WHERE NOVEMBER ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 This way where November takes the leaf
2 to sow only disfigurement in early snow
3 mist gained upon the night I delved, surely
4 as the city took us who can meet and go
5 (who might have parted, keen beyond any sea,
6 in words which no wings can engender now).
7 For this there is a beam across my head;
8 its weight not arched like heaven full, its edge
9 not bevelled, and its bulk that I accept,
10 triumphing not easily upon the brow ...
11 And, margined so, the sun may rise aware
12 (I must have waited for so devised a day)
13 of the old woman whistling in her tubs,
14 and a labyrinth of laundry in the courted sky;
15 while inside, downward passing steps
16 anon not to white buildings I have seen,
17 leave me to whispering an answer here
18 to nothing but this beam that crops my hair.
19 Vaulted in the welter of the east be read,
20 "These are thy misused deeds."---
21 And the arms, torn white and mild away, be bled.
[Page 193 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THOU CANST READ NOTHING ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Thou canst read nothing except through appetite
2 And here we join eyes in that sanctity
3 Where brother passes brother without sight,
4 But finally knows conviviality ...
5 Go then, unto thy turning and thy blame.
6 Seek bliss then, brother, in my moment\'s shame.
7 All this that baulks delivery through words
8 Shall come to you through wounds prescribed by swords:
9 That hate is but the vengeance of a long caress,
10 And fame is pivotal to shame with every sun
11 That rises on eternity\'s long willingness ...
12 So sleep, dear brother, in my fame, my shame undone.
[Page 194 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: TO LIBERTY [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Out of the seagull cries and wind
2 On this strange shore I build
3 The virgin. They laugh to hear
4 How I endow her, standing
5 Hair mocked by the sea, her lover
6 A dead sailor that knew
7 Not even Helen\'s fame.
8 Light the last torch in the wall,
9 The sea wall. Bring her no robes yet.
10 They have not seen her in this harbor;
11 Eyes widely planted, clear, yet small.
12 And must they overcome the fog,
13 Or must we rend our dream?
14 Provide these manners, this salute
15 The brows feed on, anticipate this sanction.
16 Things become separate, final---
17 While I become more whole
18 Infinite---the gradual all
19 Which is a laugh at last
20 Struggles
[Page 195 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: TO THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE\'S STATUE
Martinique
Image of Constancy [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 2Kb]
1 You, who contain augmented tears, explosions
2 Have kissed, caressed the model of the hurricane
3 Gathered and made musical in feathered fronds
4 The slit eclipse of moon in palm-lit bonds
5 Deny me not in this sweet Caribbean dawn
6 You, who have looked back to Leda, who have seen the Swan
7 In swirling rushes, urged the appointed charge,
8 Outdid our spies and hoodwink sputum,
9 Now you may compute your lecheries---
10 As well as I, but not with her,---
11 I own it still---that sure deliberation---
12 Leave, leave that Caribbean praise to me
13 Who claims a devout concentration
14 To wage you surely out of memory---
15 Your generosity dispose relinquishment and care.
16 Thy death be sacred to all those who share
17 Love and the breath of faith, momentous bride
18 You did not die for conquerors at your side
19 Nor for that fruit of mating that is widowed pride
[Page 196 ]作者: 王敖 时间: 2007-8-4 13:22
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: A POSTSCRIPT [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 Friendship agony! words came to me
2 at last shyly. My only final friends---
3 the wren and thrush, made solid print for me
4 across dawn\'s broken arc. No; yes ... or were they
5 the audible ransom, ensign of my faith
6 toward something far, now farther than ever away?
7 Remember the lavender lilies of that dawn,
8 their ribbon miles, beside the railroad ties
9 as one nears New Orleans, sweet trenches by the train
10 after the western desert, and the later cattle country;
11 and other gratuities, like porters, jokes, roses ...
12 Dawn\'s broken arc! and noon\'s more furbished room!
13 Yet seldom was there faith in the heart\'s right kindness.
14 There were tickets and alarm clocks. There were counters and schedules;
15 and a paralytic woman on an island of the Indies,
16 Antillean fingers counting my pulse, my love forever.
[Page 197 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE PILLAR AND THE POST [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
1 What you may yank up readiest Yank---
2 May not so well serve your purpose as your plaint
3 When you have no one but the devil---to thank
4 And you wretched with your clean-limbed taint---
5 Of strangling the Argives of the palms---
6 Midas of motion---love those lingering
7 instants that bespeak a careful manure for all
8 your progeny---and ask the sun what time it
9 is before your fingers lose their ten---in biological
10 and betrothèd answer to the ambitious monkey synthesis
11 that you adore.
[Page 198 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE VISIBLE THE UNTRUE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 1Kb]
to E. O.
1 Yes, I being
2 the terrible puppet of my dreams, shall
3 lavish this on you---
4 the dense mine of the orchid, split in two.
5 And the fingernails that cinch such
6 environs?
7 And what about the staunch neighbor tabulations,
8 with all their zest for doom?
9 I\'m wearing badges
10 that cancel all your kindness. Forthright
11 I watch the silver Zeppelin
12 destroy the sky. To
13 stir your confidence?
14 To rouse what sanctions---? toothaches?
15 The silver strophe ... the canto
16 bright with myth ... Such
17 distances leap landward without
18 evil smile. And, as for me ...
19 The window weight throbs in its blind
20 partition. To extinguish what I have of faith.
21 Yes, light. And it is always
22 always, always the eternal rainbow
23 And it is always the day, the farewell day unkind.
[Page 199 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: A TRAVELLER BORN [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 2Kb]
1 Of sailors---those two Corsicans at Marseille,---
2 The Dane at Paris and the Spanish abbé
3 With distance, lizard-like, green as Pernod;
4 Its cargo drench, its wet inferno
5 Condenses memory. The abbey colonnade, the vesperal Fountain---
6 Oh, sudden apple-math of ripe night fallen!
7 Concluding handclasp, cider, summer-swollen
8 Folds, and is folden in the echoing mountain....
9 Yields and is shielded, wrapt in traffic flame,
10 The One, this crucifix that bears a name
11 Like Science, and the Pasteur Institute ...
12 That home for serums keeps the student mute
13 Until the Fourteenth of July---
14 (Contain the Paternosters and waive the West wind By)
15 When midnight to lamp bruised black
16 That nuisance silhouette unhands me
17 On the ceiling---the midnight clasp extends
18 (My shadow to myself)
19 To all the courtesies of foreign friends---
20 I read it clear of anything that bows
21 Less of the midnight than that midnight shows
22 Into intrinsic skeletal sincerity---
23 Less than the stoker or the pilot knows
24 More than the statesman or the plowman shows....
25 This rhetoric sincere that blinds its flame
26 To yield it without smoke, intense and sure
27 The flower\'s unwithered in vase with name
28 And so the traveller\'s home\'s a foreign Cure
[Page 200 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: HAVANA ROSE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
[End note: 2Kb]
1 Let us strip the desk for action---now we have a horse
2 in Mexico.... That night in Vera Cruz---verily for me "the
3 True Cross"---let us remember the Doctor and my thoughts,
4 my humble, fond remembrances of the great bacteriologist
5 ... The wind, that night, the clamour
6 of incessant shutters, trundle doors---and the cheroot
7 watchman---
8 tiptoeing the successive patio balconies with a typical pis-
9 tol---trying to muffle doors---and the
10 pharos shine---the mid-wind midnight stroke of it, its
11 milk-light regularity
12 above my bath partition through the
13 lofty, dusty glass---Cortez---Cortez---hiscrumbled palace in the
14 square---the typhus in a trap, the Doctor\'s rat trap.
15 Where? Somewhere in Vera Cruz---to bring---to take---
16 to mix---to ransom---to deduct---to cure....
17 The rats played ring around the rosy (in their basement
18 basinette)---the Doctor
19 slept supposedly in #35---thus in my wakeful watch at
20 least---the
21 lighthouse flashed ... whirled ... delayed, and struck---
22 again, again. Only the Mayans surely slept---
23 whose references to typhus and whose records
24 spurted the Doctor into something nigh those
25 metaphysics that are typhoid plus---and had engaged
26 him once before to death\'s beyond and back again
27 ---antagonistic wills---into immunity. Tact,
28 horsemanship, courage were germicides to him....
29 Poets may not be doctors, but doctors are rare
30 poets when roses leap like rats---and too,
31 when rats make rose nozzles of pink death around
32 white teeth....
[Page 201 ]
33 And during the wait over dinner at La Diana,
34 the Doctor had said---who was American also---
35 "You cannot heed the negative---, so might go on
36 to undeserved doom ... must therefore loose yourself
37 within a pattern\'s mastery that you can conceive, that
38 you can yield to---by which also you
39 win and gain that mastery and happiness which
40 is your own from Birth."
[Page 202 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: PURGATORIO [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 My country, O my land, my friends---
2 Am I apart,---here from you in a land
3 Where all your gas lights---faces,---sputum gleam
4 Like something left, forsaken,---here am I---
5 And are these stars---the high plateau---the scents
6 Of Eden---and the dangerous tree---are these
7 The landscape of confession---and if confession
8 So absolution? Wake pines---but pines wake here.
9 I dream the too-keen cider---the too-soft snow.
10 Where are the bayonets that the scorpion may not grow?
11 Here quakes of earth make houses fall---
12 And all my countrymen I see rush toward one stall.
13 Exile is thus a purgatory---not such as Dante built
14 But rather like a blanket than a quilt
15 And I have no decision---is it green or brown
16 That I prefer to country or to town?
17 I am unraveled, umbilical anew,
18 So ring the church bells here in Mexico---
19 (They ring too obdurately here to need my call)
20 And what hours they forget to chime I\'ll know
21 As one whose altitude at one time was
22 not
[Page 203 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE CIRCUMSTANCE [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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To Xochipilli
1 The anointed stone, the coruscated crown---
2 The drastic throne, the
3 Desperate sweet eyepit-basins of a bloody foreign clown---
4 Couched on bloody basins floating bone
5 Of a dismounted people. ...
6 If you could buy the stones,
7 Display the stumbling bones
8 Urging your unsuspecting
9 Shins, sus-
10 Taining nothing in time but more and more of Time,
11 Mercurially might add but would
12 Subtract and concentrate. ... If you
13 Could drink the sun as did and does
14 Xochipilli,---as they who\'ve
15 Gone have done, as they
16 Who\'ve done. ... A god of flowers in statued
17 Stone ... of love---
18 If you could die, then starve, who live
19 Thereafter, stronger than death smiles in flowering stone;---
20 You could stop time, give florescent
21 Time a longer answer back (shave lightning,
22 Possess in halo full the winds of time)
23 A longer answer force, more enduring answer
24 As they did---and have done. ...
[Page 205 ]
FRAGMENTS
[Page 206 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: TO BUDDHA [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 You are quite outside of such issues,
2 The polished bottom of your sound font
3 Is taught to ride in heaven, and you know
4 The tangents of desire the other quells
[Page 207 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: WHERE GABLES PACK ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Where gables pack the rainless
2 fulsome sky
3 permit a song as comes into the street
4 permit a song that swings with ropes
5 and skipping feet
6 above the laughter that rebounds below.
[Page 208 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: WELL/WELL/NOT-AT-ALL [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Yakka-hoola-hikki-doola
2 Pico-della-miran-dohhh-la
3 leonarda-della-itchy-vinci
4 es braust ein Ruf wie
5 DONNERHALL
6 pffffff !
[Page 209 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: YOU ARE THAT FRAIL ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 You are that frail decision that devised
2 Their lowest common multiple of human need,
3 And on that bleak assumption risked the prize
4 Forgetfulness of all you bait for greed ...
[Page 210 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE MASTERS [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Their brains are smooth machines that colonize
2 The sun,---their eyes are atoms of a split hereafter.
3 They must explain away all moan and laughter,
4 Then ticket, subdivide and overrule
5 Each former entity
6 I saw them turn old Demos from the stage
7 And mock their hearts because their hearts spoke better,
8 Elaborate all, divided school by school
[Page 211 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: HER EYES HAD ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Her eyes had the blue of desperate days,
2 Freezingly bright; I saw her hair unfurl,
3 Unsanctioned, finally, by anything left her to know
4 She had learned that Paradise is not a question of eggs
5 If anything, it was her privilege to undress
6 Quietly in a glass she had guarded
7 Always with correcting states before.
8 It was this, when I asked her how she died,
9 That asked me why her final happy cry
10 Should not have found an echo somewhere, and I stand
11 Before her finally, as beside a wall, listening as though
12 I heard the breath of Holofernes toast
13 Judith\'s cold bosom through her righteous years.
[Page 212 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: O MOON, THOU COOL ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 O moon, thou cool sibilance of the sun, we utmost love
2 A Quaker in the sky the clouds resign---
3 For that ye yield one answer, one above
4 All else of midnight---that we shall not
5 I begged a mediator in thy sign
6 thy free industry
7 Thy leap and petal over the stiff edge
8 Where no one else dare set the wedge
9 O the moon crops weather on the spine
10 Of every buckwheat that the bee takes in in his prime
11 Your mother, sibilance of the sun, is the vine
[Page 213 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE SEA RAISED UP ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 The sea raised up a campanile ... The wind I heard
2 Of brine partaking, whirling into shower
3 Of column that breakers sheared in shower
4 Back into bosom,---me---her, into natal power ...
[Page 214 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: SO DREAM THY SAILS ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 So dream thy sails, O phantom bark
2 That I thy drownèd men may speak again
3 Perhaps as once Will Collins spoke the lark,
4 And leave me half adream upon the main.
5 For who shall lift head up to funnel smoke,
6 And who trick back the leisured winds again
7 As they were fought---and wooed? They now but stoke
8 Their vanity, and dream no land in vain.
9 Of old there was a promise, and thy sails
10 Have kept no faith but wind, the cold stream
11 ---The hot fickle wind, the breath of males
12 Imprisoned never, no not soot and steam
[Page 215 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: I HAVE THAT SURE ENCLITIC ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 I have that sure enclitic to my act
2 Which shall insure no dissonance to fact.
3 Then Agamemnon\'s locks grow to shape
4 Without my forebear\'s priceless model of the ape. ...
5 Gorillas die---and so do humanists---who keep
6 Comparisons clear for evolution\'s non-escape
7 And man the deathless target, of his own weak sheep ...
[Page 216 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: SHALL I SUBSUME ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Shall I subsume the shadow of the world---
2 The sun-spot that absolves us all? In fine
3 There is the wisp, there is the phantom,
4 "Fantisticon", in the comedy where we meet.
5 The interlude without circumvention
6 This, between the speech of shells and battle gases.
7 I know this effort by the slant of the obdurate moon.
8 She, at worst, is the chancel---of our worst reflection
9 Immeasurable scope of veins, imprisoned within mood
10 Whereon the distance thrives---O jealousy of space!
11 I, these cameos, carve---thy caverns limitless achieve---
12 These arteries explore. What is the extent of the sod?
13 And where is the clod blown up with
[Page 217 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: TENDERNESS AND RESOLUTION [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Tenderness and resolution
2 What is our life without a sudden pillow---
3 What is death without a ditch?
4 The harvest laugh of bright Apollo
5 And the flint tooth of Sagittarius
6 Rhyme from the same jaw---(closing cinch by cinch)
7 And pocket us who, somehow, do not follow,
8 As though we knew those who are variants---
9 Charms---that each by each refuse the clinch
10 With desperate propriety, whose name is writ
11 In wider letters than the alphabet,---
12 Who is now left to vary the Sanscrit
13 Pillowed by
14 My wrist in the vestibule of time---who
15 Will hold it---wear the keepsake, dear, of time---
16 Return the mirage on a coin that spells
17 Something of sand and sun the Nile defends. ...
[Page 218 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: TIME CANNOT BE WORN ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Time cannot be worn strapped to the supple wrist
2 Like any buckled jewel or bangle; no,
3 Lady, though fingers that attach it twist
4 The oyster from its shell, may guide the bow
5 Across cool strings that lift a lasting claim
6 Upon Eternity. No, Lady,
[Page 219 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: I ROB MY BREAST ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 I rob my breast to reach those altitudes---
2 To meet the meaningless concussion of
3 Pure heights---Infinity resides below. ...
4 The obelisk of plain infinity founders below,
5 My vision is a grandiose dilemma---
6 Place de la Concorde! Across that crowded plain---
7 I fought to see the stricken bones, the noble
8 Carcass of a general, dead Foch, proceed
9 To the defunct pit of Napoleon---in honor
10 Defender, not usurper.
11 My countrymen,---give form and edict---
12 To the marrow. You shall know
13 The harvest as you have known the spring
14 But I believe that such "wreckage" as I find
15 Remaining presents evidence of considerably more
16 Significance than do the cog-walk gestures
17 Of a beetle in a sand pit.
[Page 220 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: ENRICH MY RESIGNATION ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Enrich my resignation as I usurp those far
2 Feints of control---hear rifles blown out on the stag
3 Below the aeroplane---and see the fox\'s brush
4 Whisk silently beneath the red hill\'s crag
5 ---Extinction stirred on either side
6 Because love wonders, keeps a certain mirth---
7 Die, Oh, centuries, die, as Dionysius said,
8 Yet live in all my resignation---
9 It is the moment, now, when all---
10 The heartstrings spring, unlaced---Oh thou fiend and
11 Here is the peace of the fathers
[Page 221 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: ALL THIS ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 All this---and the housekeeper---
2 Written on a blotter, Hartford, Bridgeport---
3 The weekend at Holyoke
4 His daughters act like kings
5 Pauline and I, the Harvard game
6 ---A brand new platform
7 Way on Stutzing up to Spring
8 ---Not a cent, not a cent, wish we\'d known beforehand.
9 And the last of the Romanoffs
10 Translated the International Code
11 Tea and toast across radios
12 Swung into lullabies.
13 His father gave him the store outright
14 ---All sorts of money, Standard Oil
15 And his two sons, their fourth or fifth cousins
16 How well he carried himself
17 And a stick all the time
[Page 222 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THE ALERT PILLOW ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 The alert pillow, the hayseed spreads
2 And mountains wasting carpet---
3 O willows, drooping forecast---tears?
4 That demiurge, turf earns the station
5 Whereby candles are bought and hymns
6 Sparkle alone in wastebaskets and whereto
7 Scythes, those seldom spears---by
8 Poets urged---so their sunset crescents
9 Swiftly and like iron sweep acceptance
[Page 223 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THERE ARE THE LOCAL ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 There are the local orchard boughs
2 With apples---August boughs---their unspilled spines
3 Inter-wrenched and flocking with gold spousal wine
4 Like hummocks drifting in the autumn shine
[Page 224 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: DUST NOW IS ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 Dust now is the old-fashioned house
2 Where Jacob dreamed his ladder climb,---
3 Thankfully fed both hog and mouse
4 And mounted rung on rung of rhyme
[Page 225 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: THEY WERE THERE ... [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 They were there falling;
2 And they fell. And their habitat
3 Left them. And they fell.
4 And what they remembered was---
5 Dismembered. But they fell.
6 And now they dispel
7 Those wonders that posterity constructs,
8 By such a mystery as time obstructs;
9 And all the missions and votaries
10 And old maids with their chronic coteries
11 Dispense in the old, old lorgnette views
12 What should have kept them straight in pews.
13 But doesn\'t confuse
14 These Indians, who scan more news
15 On the hind end of their flocks each day
16 Than all these tourists bring their way.
[Page 226 ]
Crane, Hart, 1899-1932: TO CONQUER VARIETY [from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1986), Liveright]
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1 I have seen my ghost broken
2 My body blessed
3 And Eden
4 Scraped from my mother\'s breast
5 When the charge was spoken
6 Love dispossessed
7 And the seal broken. ....
[Page 227 ]
A NOTE ON THE EDITORIAL METHOD
The aim of this edition is to produce a text of the published and unpublished poems of Hart Crane that is as close as possible to his latest intention in his most authoritative form of each poem. Consequently, his latest copy meant for the printer, or the subsequent form of the text closest to that copy, has been chosen as Crane\'s intended text, for, as modern textual theory recognizes, they are the forms with highest reliability in both micro- and macro-elements. When the printer\'s copy has not survived---often the case with Crane\'s poems---the first printing, which is the next closest text to the printer\'s copy, is used for the text in this edition. If some other form is closer or more reliable, it is discussed in the Notes. Since any incomplete or fragmentary pieces have a less than certain authorial intention inherent in their extant forms, the editor has deduced Crane\'s intended text according to the poet\'s usual practice. This criterion is based on careful study of Crane\'s habits of living and writing, and informed by a complete collation of all Crane\'s variants in order to determine a text in the absence of a fair copy. It is central, though, that the texts provided here are primarily the author\'s, not this editor\'s; nor those of Crane\'s other editors, whose alterations are not cited unless it is necessary and space allows. This text and its emendations have been shaped, however, by a critical interpretation of other editors\' readings of dubious passages, especially in works that are less than complete. Thus this edition emends defective texts only by using forms which are demonstrably Crane\'s, or because there is a patent error that he missed that should be corrected.
The editor has not imposed consistency regarding capitalization or punctuation, unless it is clear that such inconsistencies derive from an oversight or from the unauthorized license of editor or compositor. Any need for editorial emendation is justified in the Notes (if the correction is not an obvious one), as is the rationale concerning the "KEY WEST" folder. The present edition normalizes the number and spacing of dots if the poet\'s form is ambiguous or erratic, unless he specifically noted (as in "Cape Hatteras," for example) that his form of the ellipsis should remain intentionally at variance from the norm. Thus the closeup placement
[Page 228 ]
of four dots represents the period directly after the last quoted word, and the spaced placement (as in three dots) represents an ellipsis that begins in mid-sentence and the fourth dot indicates the final period. Other normalizations are mainly a matter of mechanical presentation. Heading capitals in the first line of a poem or section of a poem are silently altered in this edition. Line- and page-breaks, if they obscure stanzaic structure and are clearly a result only of house style, are altered---and discussed in the Notes when need be. All digraphs have been emended, since they are the imposition of house style. Anomalous typographical usage has been normalized when it does not originate in Crane\'s documents, or if it is inconsequential, such as the upper- or lower-case letters of a title and final periods in titles or sections of poems. Line counts for separate poems are literal and consecutive; one word counts as a line if it is written as a line in Crane\'s last extant version. Poems part of a series, such as the sections of "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," "Voyages," or THE BRIDGE, are line-numbered separately (and not continuously from first to last section of the poem) for reasons of convenience rather than because of assumptions about such sequences of poems as more or less unified.
[Page 229 ]
Epilogue
Br THE BRIDGE A Poem by HART CRANE (New York: Horace Liveright, 1930).
c. circa. about
HC Hart Crane
WB White Buildings: Poems by Hart Crane (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926).
In order to afford precise distinctions for the reader\'s recognition of HC\'s development as an artist in light of his complete as well as not finished work, the editor has grouped The Poems of Hart Crane into seven parts, along with Notes on dates of composition and first publication by HC, and other relevant information regarding the source of each poem, editorial emendation of the poems, and explanations of significant critical elements as space allows. The first two sections consist of HC\'s two separately published books. The next five parts comprise complete, incomplete, and fragmentary works. By distinguishing incomplete works from fragments, one soon realizes that HC left the former in a relatively finished if not complete fair-copy form compared to his verse fragments. HC gave titles to all the incomplete works except those which begin "This Way Where November..." and "Thou Canst Read Nothing...". To only four of the fragments did HC give titles. One of them, "The Masters," HC himself designated as a "fragment note," while the other three are only pieces or fragments of works that he never developed. The grouping of incomplete works apart from fragments provides the discrimination necessary for the reader\'s immediate comprehension of, and insight into, HC\'s incomplete works as such, and his fragments such as they are, namely parts of works that have survived in not even an incomplete form.
Therefore, HC\'s intentions for sequence of publication of his major works in separate book form are accorded primacy, and his third tentative book or section of a book of collected poems follows (with justification in the Notes). Although it is not known what HC would have done with his incomplete works and fragments, in the absence of his clear intentions, they are grouped after his purposely separate publications
[Page 230 ]
(White Buildings and THE BRIDGE), a provisionally distinct collection ("KEY WEST"), poems published individually but uncollected by him, and works he did not publish himself. Thus The Poems of Hart Crane presents each text according to the place it takes along a continuum varying from separate publications to fragments. Such a sequence comes closest to how HC would have intended his editor to present his extant compositions to future readers eager to have for the first time the complete canon of all his ninety-two poems (besides those in HC\'s two books published in his lifetime) available in one volume.
ablo and Pedro, and black Serafin