Modern American Poetry

(^350) David Bromwich
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.
The poem answers directly with the poet’s voice an experience “Preludes”
reported as occurring once to someone, the experience that brought “Such a
vision of the street / As the street hardly understands.”
The “smirk” can seem a mystifying detail even to a reader who feels its
rightness. It suggests the improbability of human contact in the city’s crowds,
where the “squint” looking for the main chance blots out every other
concern. The tone is a good deal like “Wipe your hand across your mouth,
and laugh”; and maybe for a moment this poem is testing a similar note of
scorn. Then the gesture is looked at differently: “The game enforces smirks;
but we have seen / The moon in lonely alleys make / A grail of laughter.”
The game may be the one Walt Whitman spoke of in Song of Myself,
“Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, / Both in and
out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.” Crane’s mood suggests
something of this poise and inquisitiveness. The kitten, a child of the city, has
wandered in from outside the game, a chance embodiment of the “suffering
thing.” To keep it safe from the fury of the street is a charity worthy of
Chaplin’s tramp.
The modern artist exists to invent a shelter for the most vagrant
sympathies. Crane said so in the letter to William Wright in which he also
declared his interest in Chaplin:
I am moved to put Chaplin with the poets (of today); hence the
“we.” In other words, he, especially in “The Kid,” made me feel
myself, as a poet, as being “in the same boat” with him. Poetry,
the human feelings, “the kitten,” is so crowded out of the
humdrum, rushing, mechanical scramble of today that the man
who would preserve them must duck and camouflage for dear life
to keep them or keep himself from annihilation.... I have tried to
express these “social sympathies” in words corresponding
somewhat to the antics of the actor.
This summary brings to light the active impulse Crane speaks of missing in
Eliot. But one must resist the temptation to suppose that either poet was
aiming for effects the other accomplished. I doubt that Eliot, given the