Part 1

White Buildings: Poems by Hart Crane

_With a Foreword by_ ALLEN TATE

BONI & LIVERIGHT, 1926

COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

To WALDO FRANK

Ce ne peut être que la fin du monde, en avançant. -RIMBAUD.

Certain of these poems have appeared in the following magazines: _Broom_, _The Dial_, _Double Dealer_, _Fugitive_, _Little Review_, _1924_, _Poetry_, _Secession_, and _The Calendar_ (London).

FOREWORD

The poetry of Hart Crane is ambitious. It is the only poetry I am acquainted with which is at once contemporary and in the grand manner. It is an American poetry. Crane’s themes are abstractly, metaphysically conceived, but they are definitely confined to an experience of the American scene. In such poems as The Wine Menagerie, For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen, Recitative, he is the poet of the complex urban civilization of his age: precision, abstraction, power. There is no _pastiche_; when he employs symbols from traditional literature, the intention is personally symbolic; it is never falsely pretentious with the common baggage of poetical speech, the properties coveted by the vulgar as inherently poetic.

Hart Crane’s first experiments in verse are not, of course, collected in this volume, which contains with one or two exceptions only those poems exhibiting the qualities likely to be permanent in his work. Of these exceptions there is the perfectly written piece of Imagism, Garden Abstract. This poem evinces several properties of the “new poetry” of a decade ago, the merits and the limitations of the Imagists. To the Imagists Crane doubtless went to school in poetry. He learned their structural economy; he followed their rejection of the worn-out poetic phrase; he must have studied the experiments in rhythm of Pound, Aldington, Fletcher. From Pound and Eliot he got his first conception of what it is, in the complete sense, to be contemporary.

But Crane suddenly and profoundly broke with the methods of Imagism, with its decorative and fragmentary world. To the conceptual mind a world set up not by inclusive assertion but by exclusive attention to the objects of sense lacks imaginative coördination; a method which refuses to exceed the dry presentation of _petites sensations_ confines the creative vision to suggestions, to implicit indications, but it cannot arrive at the direct affirmation, of a complete world. A series of Imagistic poems is a series of worlds. The poems of Hart Crane are facets of a single vision; they refer to a central imagination, a single evaluating power, which is at once the motive of the poetry and the form of its realization.

The poet who tries to release the imagination as an integer of perception attempts the solution of the leading contemporary problem of his art. It would be impertinent to enumerate here the underlying causes of the dissociation of the modern consciousness: the poet no longer apprehends his world as a Whole. The dissociation appears decisively for the first time in Baudelaire. It is the separation of vision and subject; since Baudelaire’s time poets have in some sense been deficient in the one or the other. For the revolt of Rimbaud, in this distinction, was a repudiation of the commonly available themes of poetry, followed by a steady attenuation of vision in the absence of thematic control. Exactly to the extent to which the ready-pmade theme controls the vision, the vision is restricted by tradition and may, to that extent, be defined by tradition. In The Waste Land, which revives the essence of the problem, Mr. Eliot displays vision and subject once more in traditional schemes; the vision for some reason is dissipated, and the subject dead. For while Mr. Eliot might have written a more ambitiously unified poem, the unity would have been false; tradition as unity is not contemporary. The important contemporary poet has the rapidly diminishing privilege of reorganizing the subjects of the past. He must construct and assimilate his own subjects. Dante had only to assimilate his.

If the energy of Crane’s vision never quite reaches a sustained maximum, it is because he has not found a suitable theme. To realize even partially, at the present time, the maximum of poetic energy demonstrates an important intention. Crane’s poems are a fresh vision of the world, so intensely personalized in a new creative language that only the strictest and most unprepossessed effort of attention can take it in. Until vision and subject completely fuse, the poems will be difficult. The comprehensiveness and lucidity of any poetry, the capacity for poetry being assumed as proved, are in direct proportion to the availability of a comprehensive and perfectly articulated given theme.

Crane wields a sonorous rhetoric that takes the reader to Marlowe and the Elizabethans. His blank verse, the most sustained medium he controls, is pre-Websterian; it is measured, richly textured, rhetorical. But his spiritual allegiances are outside the English tradition. Melville and Whitman are his avowed masters. In his sea poems, Voyages, in Emblems of Conduct, in allusions to the sea throughout his work, there is something of Melville’s intense, transcendental brooding on the mystery of the “high interiors of the sea.” I do not know whether he has mastered Poe’s criticism, yet some of his conviction that the poet should be intensely local must stem from Poe. Most of it, however, he undoubtedly gets from Whitman. Whitman’s range was possible in an America of prophecy; Crane’s America is materially the same, but it approaches a balance of forces; it is a realization; and the poet, confronted with a complex present experience, gains in intensity what he loses in range. The great proportions of the myth have collapsed in its reality. Crane’s poetry is a concentration of certain phases of the Whitman substance, the fragments of the myth.

The great difficulty which his poetry presents the reader is the style. It is possible that his style may check the immediate currency of the most distinguished American poetry of the age, for there has been very little preparation in America for a difficult poetry; the Imagistic impressionism of the last ten years has not supplied it. Although Crane is probably not a critical and systematic reader of foreign literatures, his French is better than Whitman’s; he may have learned something from Laforgue and, particularly, Rimbaud; or something of these poets from Miss Sitwell, Mr. Wallace Stevens, or Mr. T. S. Eliot.

He shares with Rimbaud the device of oblique presentation of theme. The theme never appears in explicit statement. It is formulated through a series of complex metaphors which defy a paraphrasing of the sense into an equivalent prose. The reader is plunged into a strangely unfamiliar _milieu_ of sensation, and the principle of its organization is not immediately grasped. The _logical_ meaning can never be derived (see Passage, Lachrymae Christi); but the _poetical_ meaning is a direct intuition, realized prior to an explicit knowledge of the subject-matter of the poem. The poem does not _convey_; it _presents_; it is not topical, but expressive.

There is the opinion abroad that Crane’s poetry is, in some indefinite sense, “new.” It is likely to be appropriated by one of the several esoteric cults of the American soul. It tends toward the formation of a state of mind, the critical equivalent of which would be in effect an exposure of the confusion and irrelevance of the current journalism of poetry, and of how far behind the creative impulse the critical intelligence, at the moment, lags. It is to be hoped, therefore, that this state of mind, where it may be registered at all, will not at its outset be shunted into a false context of obscure religious values, that a barrier will not be erected between it and the rational order of criticism. For, unless the present critic is deceived as to the structure of his tradition, the well-meaning criticism since Poe has supported a vicious confusion: it has transferred the states of mind of poetry from their proper contexts to the alien contexts of moral and social aspiration. The moral emphasis is valid; but its focus on the consequences of the state of mind, instead of on its properties as art, has throttled a tradition in poetry. The moral values of literature should derive from literature, not from the personal values of the critic; their public circulation in criticism, if they are not ultimately to be rendered inimical to literature, should be controlled by the literary intention. There have been poetries of “genius” in America, but each of these as poetry has been scattered, and converted into an _impasse_ to further extensions of the same order of imagination.

A living art is new; it is old. The formula which I have contrived in elucidation of Crane’s difficulty for the reader (a thankless task, since the difficulty inheres equally in him) is a formula for most romantic poetry. Shelley could not have been influenced by Rimbaud, but he wrote this “difficult” verse:

_Pinnacled dim in the intense inane._

The present faults of Crane’s poetry (it has its faults: it is not the purpose of this Foreword to disguise them) cannot be isolated in a line-by-line recognition of his difficulty. If the poems are sometimes obscure, the obscurity is structural and deeper. His faults, as I have indicated, lie in the occasional failure of meeting between vision and subject. The vision often strains and overreaches the theme. This fault, common among ambitious poets since Baudelaire, is not unique with them. It appears whenever the existing poetic order no longer supports the imagination. It appeared in the eighteenth century with the poetry of William Blake.

ALLEN TATE.

CONTENTS

PAGE

FOREWORD, _by Allen Tate_ xi

LEGEND 3

BLACK TAMBOURINE 5

EMBLEMS OF CONDUCT 6

MY GRANDMOTHER’S LOVE LETTERS 7

SUNDAY MORNING APPLES 9

PRAISE FOR AN URN 11

GARDEN ABSTRACT 13

STARK MAJOR 14

CHAPLINEQSUE 16

PASTORALE 18

IN SHADOW 19

THE FERNERY 20

NORTH LABRADOR 21

REPOSE OF RIVERS 22

PARAPHRASE 24

POSSESSIONS 25

LACHRYMAE CHRISTI 27

PASSAGE 30

THE WINE MENAGERIE 32

RECITATIVE 35

FOR THE MARRIAGE OF FAUSTUS AND HELEN 37

AT MELVILLE’S TOMB 45

VOYAGES, I, II, III, IV, V, VI 49

_White Buildings_

WHITE BUILDINGS

LEGEND

As silent as a mirror is believed Realities plunge in silence by....

I am not ready for repentance; Nor to match regrets. For the moth Bends no more than the still Imploring flame. And tremorous In the white falling flakes Kisses are,-- The only worth all granting.

It is to be learned-- This cleaving and this burning, But only by the one who Spends out himself again.

Twice and twice (Again the smoking souvenir, Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again.

Until the bright logic is won Unwhispering as a mirror Is believed.

Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry Shall string some constant harmony,-- Relentless caper for all those who step The legend of their youth into the noon.

BLACK TAMBOURINE

The interests of a black man in a cellar Mark tardy judgment on the world’s closed door. Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle, And a roach spans a crevice in the floor.

Æsop, driven to pondering, found Heaven with the tortoise and the hare; Fox brush and sow ear top his grave And mingling incantations on the air.

The black man, forlorn in the cellar, Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark, that lies, Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall, And, in Africa, a carcass quick with flies.

EMBLEMS OF CONDUCT

By a peninsula the wanderer sat and sketched The uneven valley graves. While the apostle gave Alms to the meek the volcano burst With sulphur and aureate rocks ... For joy rides in stupendous coverings Luring the living into spiritual gates.

Orators follow the universe And radio the complete laws to the people. The apostle conveys thought through discipline. Bowls and cups fill historians with adorations,-- Dull lips commemorating spiritual gates.

The wanderer later chose this spot of rest Where marble clouds support the sea And where was finally borne a chosen hero. By that time summer and smoke were past. Dolphins still played, arching the horizons, But only to build memories of spiritual gates.

MY GRANDMOTHER’S LOVE LETTERS

There are no stars to-night But those of memory. Yet how much room for memory there is In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough For the letters of my mother’s mother, Elizabeth, That have been pressed so long Into a corner of the roof That they are brown and soft, And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space Steps must be gentle. It is all hung by an invisible white hair. It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

“Are your fingers long enough to play Old keys that are but echoes: Is the silence strong enough To carry back the music to its source And back to you again As though to her?”

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand Through much of what she would not understand; And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

SUNDAY MORNING APPLES

_To William Sommer_

The leaves will fall again sometime and fill The fleece of nature with those purposes That are your rich and faithful strength of line.

But now there are challenges to spring In that ripe nude with head reared Into a realm of swords, her purple shadow Bursting on the winter of the world From whiteness that cries defiance to the snow.

A boy runs with a dog before the sun, straddling Spontaneities that form their independent orbits, Their own perennials of light In the valley where you live (called Brandywine).

I have seen the apples there that toss you secrets,-- Beloved apples of seasonable madness That feed your inquiries with aerial wine. Put them again beside a pitcher with a knife, And poise them full and ready for explosion-- The apples, Bill, the apples!

PRAISE FOR AN URN

_In Memoriam: Ernest Nelson_

It was a kind and northern face That mingled in such exile guise The everlasting eyes of Pierrot And, of Gargantua, the laughter.

His thoughts, delivered to me From the white coverlet and pillow, I see now, were inheritances-- Delicate riders of the storm.

The slant moon on the slanting hill Once moved us toward presentiments Of what the dead keep, living still, And such assessments of the soul

As, perched in the crematory lobby, The insistent clock commented on, Touching as well upon our praise Of glories proper to the time.

Still, having in mind gold hair, I cannot see that broken brow And miss the dry sound of bees Stretching across a lucid space.

Scatter these well-meant idioms Into the smoky spring that fills The suburbs, where they will be lost. They are no trophies of the sun.

GARDEN ABSTRACT

The apple on its bough is her desire,-- Shining suspension, mimic of the sun. The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice, Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes. She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.

And so she comes to dream herself the tree, The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins, Holding her to the sky and its quick blue, Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight. She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.

STARK MAJOR

The lover’s death, how regular With lifting spring and starker Vestiges of the sun that somehow Filter in to us before we waken.

Not yet is there that heat and sober Vivisection of more clamant air That hands joined in the dark will answer After the daily circuits of its glare.

It is the time of sundering ... Beneath the green silk counterpane Her mound of undelivered life Lies cool upon her--not yet pain.

And she will wake before you pass, Scarcely aloud, beyond her door, And every third step down the stair Until you reach the muffled floor--

Will laugh and call your name; while you Still answering her faint good-byes, Will find the street, only to look At doors and stone with broken eyes.

Walk now, and note the lover’s death. Henceforth her memory is more Than yours, in cries, in ecstasies You cannot ever reach to share.

CHAPLINESQUE

We make our meek adjustments, Contented with such random consolations As the wind deposits In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find A famished kitten on the step, and know Recesses for it from the fury of the street, Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us, Facing the dull squint with what innocence And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane; Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise. We can evade you, and all else but the heart: What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen The moon in lonely alleys make A grail of laughter of an empty ash can, And through all sound of gaiety and quest Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

PASTORALE

No more violets, And the year Broken into smoky panels. What woods remember now Her calls, her enthusiasms.

That ritual of sap and leaves The sun drew out, Ends in this latter muffled Bronze and brass. The wind Takes rein.

If, dusty, I bear An image beyond this Already fallen harvest, I can only query, “Fool-- Have you remembered too long;

Or was there too little said For ease or resolution-- Summer scarcely begun And violets, A few picked, the rest dead?”

IN SHADOW

Out in the late amber afternoon, Confused among chrysanthemums, Her parasol, a pale balloon, Like a waiting moon, in shadow swims.

Her furtive lace and misty hair Over the garden dial distill The sunlight,--then withdrawing, wear Again the shadows at her will.

Gently yet suddenly, the sheen Of stars inwraps her parasol. She hears my step behind the green Twilight, stiller than shadows, fall.

“Come, it is too late,--too late To risk alone the light’s decline: Nor has the evening long to wait,”-- But her own words are night’s and mine.

THE FERNERY

The lights that travel on her spectacles Seldom, now, meet a mirror in her eyes. But turning, as you may chance to lift a shade Beside her and her fernery, is to follow The zigzags fast around dry lips composed To darkness through a wreath of sudden pain.

--So, while fresh sunlight splinters humid green I have known myself a nephew to confusions That sometimes take up residence and reign In crowns less grey--O merciless tidy hair!

NORTH LABRADOR

A land of leaning ice Hugged by plaster-grey arches of sky, Flings itself silently Into eternity.

“Has no one come here to win you, Or left you with the faintest blush Upon your glittering breasts? Have you no memories, O Darkly Bright?”

Cold-hushed, there is only the shifting of moments That journey toward no Spring-- No birth, no death, no time nor sun In answer.

REPOSE OF RIVERS

The willows carried a slow sound, A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead. I could never remember That seething, steady leveling of the marshes Till age had brought me to the sea.

Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves Where cypresses shared the noon’s Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost. And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them Asunder....

How much I would have bartered! the black gorge And all the singular nestings in the hills Where beavers learn stitch and tooth. The pond I entered once and quickly fled-- I remember now its singing willow rim.

And finally, in that memory all things nurse; After the city that I finally passed With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts The monsoon cut across the delta At gulf gates.... There, beyond the dykes

I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer, And willows could not hold more steady sound.

PARAPHRASE

Of a steady winking beat between Systole, diastole spokes-of-a-wheel One rushing from the bed at night May find the record wedged in his soul.

Above the feet the clever sheets Lie guard upon the integers of life: For what skims in between uncurls the toe, Involves the hands in purposeless repose.

But from its bracket how can the tongue tell When systematic morn shall sometime flood The pillow--how desperate is the light That shall not rouse, how faint the crow’s cavil

As, when stunned in that antarctic blaze, Your head, unrocking to a pulse, already Hollowed by air, posts a white paraphrase Among bruised roses on the papered wall.

POSSESSIONS

Witness now this trust! the rain That steals softly direction And the key, ready to hand--sifting One moment in sacrifice (the direst) Through a thousand nights the flesh Assaults outright for bolts that linger Hidden,--O undirected as the sky That through its black foam has no eyes For this fixed stone of lust....

Accumulate such moments to an hour: Account the total of this trembling tabulation. I know the screen, the distant flying taps And stabbing medley that sways-- And the mercy, feminine, that stays As though prepared.

And I, entering, take up the stone As quiet as you can make a man ... In Bleecker Street, still trenchant in a void, Wounded by apprehensions out of speech, I hold it up against a disk of light-- I, turning, turning on smoked forking spires, The city’s stubborn lives, desires.