Hart Crane The Bridge (1930)

OGCMA0800OrpheusDeath_Crane

Paris: Black Sun; New York: Liverlight, 1930

From The Bridge: �VIII Atlantis� lines 89-96

�So to thine Everpresence, beyond time,   

Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star

That bleeds infinity—the orphic strings,   

Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge:   

—One Song, one Bridge of Fire! Is it Cathay, 

Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring   

The serpent with the eagle in the leaves. . . . ?   

Whispers antiphonal in azure swing.�

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172035

[Ipso]

H. Bloom, ed., Hart Crane (Broomhall: Chelsea House, 2003): 12-13.

�Crane as American Orpheus is an inevitable image, exploited already by writers as diverse as Yvor Winters in his elegy for Crane and Tennessee Williams in Suddenly Last Summer. The best of the Orphic hymns to Crane is the astonishing poem Fish Food of John Brooks Wheelwright, except that Crane wrote his own best Orphic elegy in �Atlantis,� his close equivalent of Shelley�s Adonis. But I narrow my subject here of Crane�s �Orphism� down to its visionary epistemology or Gnosis. Crane�s Eros, his Dionysus, above all his Whitmanian Ananke, remain to be explored, but in these remarks I concern myself only with Crane as �daemon,� a potential divinity knowing simultaneously its achievement and its guilt.�

H. Crane, White Buildings (New York: Liverlight, 1972): xxiii. Foreword by John Logan.

�In 1926, as though praying that he might fight off the desire to end the pain of his conflict until he had finished more work, he wrote in the magnificent �Atlantis� section of what was to be The Bridge: �Hold thy floating singer late.� The singer was held �floating� for a few years more; then, just three months short of age thirty-three, he sank.

Hart Crane balanced on the deck rail as he had tried to balance in his life and work. Unhappily, he failed in life. The poetry, however, is controlled by words as the medium of balance; and words, put together by the gift of the poet to make the architecture of poetry, find a higher realization beyond the drives and ambivalent feelings of the poet�s unbalanced sexuality. It is this transcendence which we feel as beauty, and one of its characteristics, one of the gifts of art, is the momentary freedom from the kind of acute anxiety that eventually killed Hart Crane� (xxiii).

L.S. Dembo, Hart Crane�s Sanskrit Charge: A Study of The Bridge (Folcroft: Folcroft Press,

1969).

L. Edelman, Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane�s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (Stanford: Stanford U P, 1987): 184-85.

�Even a cursory reading of this passage must acknowledge that whatever �synthesis� Crane may be trying to proclaim here undergoes serious modification by other, less �conclusive� elements. On the one hand, the stanza offers images of transcendence: the bridge leads �beyond time,� while its strung cables �leap and converge�; but on the other hand, it introduces this concept of �infinity� through the image of those cables viewed as �spears ensanguined of one tolling star / That bleeds infinity.� Though this bloody wound heralds a kind of triumph rather than defeat, its violence cannot be overlooked, especially when the strings that �leap and converge� are characterized as �orphic.� Convergence and consolation thus mingle here with wounds and dismemberment – a dismemberment directed against the poet�s own stringed instrument of �Song.� By the same token, that celebratory cry, that apparent hymn of synthetic unity – �One Song, one Bridge of Fire� – gives way immediately to a strangely inquisitive mood that terminates in the disjunctive void of an ellipsis. Despite the �rainbows� that betoken a promise of reconciliation, the poem ends with a refusal of closure, leaving the �whispers antiphonal� to �swing� unsteadily in an ambiguous field of �azure.�"

L. Kramer, Hart Crane's 'The Bridge': An Annotated Edition (New York: Fordham

University Press, 2011).

K. Masugo, �Crossing Brooklyn Bridge: An Ekphrastic Correspondence Between Walt

Whitman, Hart Crane, and Henry Miller.� Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal 7, 100-126. Humanities Source, EBSCOhost (accessed March 3, 2014).

S. Paul, Hart�s Bridge (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1972).

R.P. Sugg, Hart Crane�s The Bridge (University: University of Alabama Press, 1976).

J.C. Wolf, Hart Crane�s Harp of Evil: A Study of Orphism in The Bridge (Troy: Whitston

Publishing Co., 1986): 1, 2-3).

�His underlying implication in The Bridge is that America fails its promise because Americans follow a doctrine (the Judeo-Christian) which, instead of fusing nature and modern technology into a universal harmony, presents nature as an enemy to be conquered and rejected. In essence, The Bridge is Crane�s presentation of an alternative mythology or belief, one of wholeness, which Crane believes will cure the ills of American society and redeem America� (1).

�He does however adhere in general to the Orphic myth and adopts various tenets of this religion for his own personal vision. One of the most attractive of these tenets for Crane is the affirmation of all of life, an amoral concept which denies nothing and has no arbitrary distinctions of �good� and �evil.� This illuminates to great extent his dissatisfaction with the Judeo-Christina tradition and its apocalyptic tendency to look upon this world, this life, as at best a testing ground which is well lost for the rewards of the Hereafter. It is this approach that Crane feels leads to that �easy acceptance of death� which he decries, an acceptance that rises from denial of the material or carnal side of life as a result of the establishment of arbitrary values of good and evil. He, on the contrary, is firmly convinced of the need for polarity in the universe, an Orphic concept which provides for duality-in-unity� (2-3).