Modern American Poetry

(^296) Langdon Hammer
position to infer it on the basis of their own experience; and what is implied,
in this case, is most significant: it is the throbbing of the heart and nerves of
a distraught man—a highly private (“subjective”) sensation, a tremor located
in the male poet’s body as he walks the Nighttown streets. To read Eliot’s line
rightly, one must have “read, seen, and experienced” enough to recognize in
one’s own body the unmentioned but urgent and inferred sensations in the
poet’s.
Unmentioned and unmentionable: the tawdry streets and urban night
of Eliot’s “Rhapsody” are both a homosexual and a modernist topos for
Crane. Linking that scene with the scene of reading as such, Crane imagines
the act of reading a modern poem—when it is successful, when the reader
and poet really “spark” (a slang word Crane used)—as a tryst. Reading is like
cruising; it calls for shared recognitions; it communicates pleasure and pain.
Even the arbitrariness of the union between a modern poet and a reader, the
necessary impersonality of their bond, becomes the ground of a profoundly
personal relation, a communication that exceeds the demands and
conventions of civil reference. When a poem is truly and fully read, poet and
reader encounter each other as equal and kindred, “twin shadowed halves”;
they recognize an essential relation beyond their random connection,
assuaging the loneliness each of them feels in his body. For Crane, the
intelligibility of Eliot’s “obscure” poems, as of his own, ultimately presumes
a transaction or pact like the unspoken, physical connection (the meeting of
smiles and eyes) that concludes “Episode of Hands.”
The bond between speaker and addressee in “At Melville’s Tomb”
dramatizes another version of this mutuality. Earlier I talked about the
problem of perspective in Crane’s poem as if only time separated Melville
and this speaker, who are otherwise bound by a shared vision. The problem
is more complicated. The opening lines of the poem do not make it clear
whether Melville “watched” the waves from “this ledge” or from a position
somehow “beneath the wave” itself. This ambiguity is coordinated with that
of the poet’s own perspective. Although he speaks “from this ledge,” he is
clearly identified with the drowned mariners, and speaks “for” them, from
their point of view. For Crane’s poet is charged with receiving and reading
the messages of the drowned; yet his own message does not represent a
decoding, so much as a repetition, of theirs; and this repetition in turn places
the reader in the position of receiver, the poet onshore. If, in Tate’s poems,
the poet takes up the position of the reader or critic, the reader in “At
Melville’s Tomb” is invited to take up the position of the poet. But the
completed communication or communion (implicitly, a kind of rescue) that
the message’s transmission would mean is repeatedly deferred through