Hart Crane (1899–1932) is as good an example of recent forgetfulness as we have — a major figure before his suicide at age 32. Although he still has admirers, his dense poetry in the high modern style (born from internalizing the world-bestriding poetry of T.S. Eliot) has no purchase on the stripped-down free verse that dominates academic poetry in America these days. And so the serious and knotted verse of Crane is washed away by the great waves of time, crashing on the shore to pull the culture’s abandoned works down into the sea.That’s a shame, for his major work — an epic called “The Bridge,” published in 1930, inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge, near which Crane lived — is in its way an answer to Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Where Eliot saw only the shattering of culture, Crane perceived in the intersection of grand architecture and dynamic construction the possibility of something more optimistic than just a wasteland in modernity.For his birthday today, July 21, it’s worth looking at his 1926 poem “At Melville’s Tomb,” perhaps the most powerful of his pre-“Bridge” poems in illustrating his thick kind of modernism. The poem takes its force from a kind of endless metonymy: the slide of a thing into something associated with it, and then the slide of that new thing into something associated with it. And on and on, until we are as far from the original as we can reach. The chain is always threatening to break, yet Crane’s rich language and seriousness of purpose keep us from ending our suspension of disbelief as we follow along. He insists that all this means something deep, and we believe him, even when we can’t quite see what that deep meaning is.The reader of “At Melville’s Tomb” needs to start with the fact that Herman Melville doesn’t actually have a tomb. He’s buried at Woodlawn Cemetery at the Bronx, at a site that has neither the ledge Crane mentions in the poem’s first line, nor a sightline to the shore. Yet by the magic of metonymy, Crane forces us to take the ocean itself as Melville’s tomb, by his association with the sea. And then we slip to the sea’s association with the bodies of the drowned, and then to the dead rising, and then to what the dead might see among the stars, until Crane brings it all back with his strange, difficult almost beyond meaning conclusion: “High in the azure steeps / Monody shall not wake the mariner. / This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.”At Melville’s Tombby Hart CraneOften beneath the wave, wide from this ledgeThe dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeathAn embassy. Their numbers as he watched,Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.And wrecks passed without sound of bells,The calyx of death’s bounty giving backA scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,The portent wound in corridors of shells.Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;And silent answers crept across the stars.Compass, quadrant and sextant contriveNo farther tides . . . High in the azure steepsMonody shall not wake the mariner.This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
