white buildings

America’s greatest poet, Hart Crane, was born on this day in 1899 and lived 32 years. I’ve written about Crane before on these pages, but it bears repeating. I have returned to his epic works “The Bridge” and “White Buildings” time and again to relive the beauty of them.

Crane was lost at sea off the coast of Cuba in 1932; some say he jumped off a boat, others say he was pushed. He was never found.

America’s first symbolist poet, Crane ushered in the use of a new language cobbled from the buzzwords of the industrial era, enmeshed in a rich, layered style — the likes of which had never been seen.  I can never look at the Brooklyn Bridge without thinking of him. Here is one of my favorite sections of “The Bridge.” (The dedication at the bottom is mine.)

To Brooklyn Bridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In memory of Helen Weiss

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