Modern American Poetry

(^302) Langdon Hammer
Milton’s “Lycidas” and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” (Arnold’s elegy for
Arthur Hugh Clough) as well as Melville’s own title “Monody”—the brief,
late elegy for Hawthorne collected in Timoleon(Hollander, Figure of Echo,
92). In the cases of Arnold and Melville, the allusion to Milton’s elegy draws
some of its force from the special power of a friendship mourned, allowing
the generic marker—monody—to indicate a state of private isolation and
bereavement: only one is left to sing. The same marker in Crane resists the
separation of the living and the dead—as Crane’s draft version, employing
the first-person plural, suggests:
Our monody shall not wake the mariner
Whose fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.
“Monody,” in this sense, reverberates with those “beating leagues of
monotone” that a shell is said to “secrete” in “Voyages VI” (Crane, Poems,
39); it is a song of unity and of union that is achieved by every singer steeped
in the sea; and it presumes no disjunction but that “single change” that Crane
calls “transmemberment.”
As a figure for historical relation, the neologism “transmemberment”
eschews the lesser reconcilements of memory to affirm the transfiguration of
the past in the present. As a rhetorical strategy, the term indicates the mode
of transumptive allusion that Hollander, Edelman, Irwin, and Bloom have
studied in Crane’s work.^20 For Crane, the goal of such a strategy is to admit
no distance—or rather: no distance that cannot be spanned—between his
own song and, in this instance, Melville’s, which, under the auspices of the
reciprocity we have been discussing, is itself shown, retrospectively, to be an
elegy and interpretation of Crane’ssong. By the most curious kind of reversal,
Melville emerges here, in Grossman’s suggestive phrase, as “a hermeneutic
friend” (Grossman, “Crane’s Intense Poetics,” 227), a version of the ideal
reader who is able to receive the message Crane bequeaths. He does so,
again, in the space of “eternity,” identified here with “the azure steeps,” the
earthly shadow or type of which only the sea “keeps.” In choosing to break
his syntax at the penultimate line, excise the possessive “Whose” and admit
the demonstrative “This,” Crane again chooses to suspend reference. “This
fabulous shadow” might designate either Melville’s shade or Crane’s—or, for
that matter, the poem itself, which is given over to the sea in a form of ritual
burial recalling the ceremonial scattering that concludes Shelley’s “Ode to
the West Wind” or Crane’s own “Praise for an Urn.” “At Melville’s Tomb”
is commended to the sea as the shadow of the fable that connects Crane and
Melville, and that together they transmit.