Modern American Poetry

(^356) David Bromwich
Whereas, in The Waste Land,nothing can come of any memory that is
reengaged, The Bridgeoffers another kind of memory: a meeting of eyes in
which “the stubborn years gleam and atone,” as the ranger’s mother says in
“Indiana.”
It is an American hope to seek atonement through experience alone. For that
reason I think Yvor Winters was right to associate The Bridgewith Song of
Myself,though he was wrong to suppose that this description entailed a self-
evident rebuke. The Bridgeand Song of Myselfhave the same kind of unity—
of mood, texture, urgency and enterprise. Crane was conscious early of this
link to Whitman, one token of which appears in “For the Marriage of
Faustus and Helen.” The poet presents himself in the midst of a crowd,
anonymous and loitering until his name is called; the passage mingles the
thought of Whitman with an echo of Eliot forgetting “the profit and loss”:
And yet, suppose some evening I forgot
The fare and transfer, yet got by that way
Without recall,—lost yet poised in traffic.
Then I might find your eyes across an aisle,
Still flickering....
The traffic makes it possible to lose oneself “without recall,” shorn of a past,
and yet to get by, to be on the move and somehow poised. The flickering
carries a range of suggestions: of a face in back of a blind; a face suggestive by
its lines, though hard to see in the glancing lights of the traffic; a face in which
the eyes themselves may be blinking. The aisle seems a metaphor for the
canyons dividing the façades of New York’s skyscrapers, or the passage between
the rows of a cinema, which in turn gives a further sense to the flickering.
In “Faustus and Helen,” as in The Bridge,eyes know more than they are
conscious of; and Crane’s thought once again comes from Whitman: “Who
knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all
you cannot see me?” From “Prufrock” on, the eyes in Eliot’s poetry are
uncertain that knowledge is to be desired. His eyes alight gently but do not
fix; they are cast down or averted—part of a face they help you to prepare “to
meet the faces that you meet.” It is fitting that Crane’s most tormenting
poem of love should have been a countersong to “Prufrock.” There are other
antithetical features of “Possessions,” the title of which (with its overtones of
demonic possession) works against the sense of material property or
furnishings. It might have been called “Dispossessions”: