Modern American Poetry

T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane 349

That time resumes,

One thinks of all the hands

That are raising dingy shades

In a thousand furnished rooms.

This landscape was often in Hart Crane’s mind when he wrote his shorter
poems of the 1920s; hints of it appear as late as the subway entry sequence of
“The Tunnel.” He remembered the same passage in a sort of private joke in
a letter: arrested drunk one night in 1927, “the next I knew the door crashed
shut and I found myself behind the bars. I imitated Chaliapin fairly well until
dawn leaked in, or rather such limited evidences of same as six o’clock whistles
and the postulated press of dirty feet to early coffee stands.” The casual
echoes have a wider meaning. The most difficult task of Crane’s poetry, as he
comes close to saying elsewhere in his letters, is to connect the thought of an
“infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing” with some surmise about the
emotions proper toward the hands in those “thousand furnished rooms.”
His first full response was “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.