Modern American Poetry

(^358) David Bromwich
screen:
Would it have been worth while
with the unreluctant answer of “Possessions”:
I know the screen, the distant flying taps
And stabbing medley that sways—
And the mercy, feminine, that stays.
The contrast follows from Crane’s determination to write of a desire on the
other side of satisfaction, to make a “Record of rage and partial appetites.”
So the wariness of
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
gives way to an agonized embrace:
I, turning, turning on smoked forking spires,
The city’s stubborn lives, desires.
Crane’s speaker has grown old with the spent vehemence of youth, but it is
Eliot’s who has the lighter step: “Prufrock” was a young man’s poem about
age.
And yet in “Possessions” the language of “Prufrock” has been so
assimilated that its ending can seem to occur the moment after “human
voices wake us and we drown.” The spray of the sea, in which Prufrock’s
mermaids were glimpsed, is taken up in “The pure possession, the inclusive
cloud” that marks the conquests and surrenders of the later poet, now burnt
forever into the city’s memory. “Possessions” is a homosexual poem, defiantly
so. But the remarkable uncollected lyric “Legende,” written when Crane was
nineteen, gives a feminine motive to the same image of erotic possession and
erasure. The woman there “has become a pathos,— / Waif of the tides”; the
poet closes by saying, “even my vision will be erased / As a cameo the waves
claim again.” This sense of the good of rendering a life permanent, even as
its detail is burned away, would be constant in Crane’s work: that is a reason
for the we of “Possessions” to imitate the Dantesque weof “Prufrock,”