Introduction 31O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precincts of the lark’s return,
Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
In single chrysalis the many twain,—
Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow
And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom—
Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time’s realm
As love strikes clear direction for the helm.Contrast the precise Shelleyan equivalent:
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!—Rome’s azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.Superficially, the two stanzas are much at variance, with Crane’s tone
apparently triumphal, Shelley’s apparently despairing. But the pragmatic or
merely natural burden of both stanzas is quite suicidal. The bridge, as “steeled
Cognizance,” resolves the many into One, but this music of unity is a “sound
of doom” for all flesh and its senses living in time’s realm. Love’s “clear
direction,” as in Shelley’s climactic stanza, is towards death. But Shelley is very
much involved in his own relation, as poet, to his own vision. Crane’s role, as
known to the bridge’s knower, forsakes that relation, and a terrifyingly free
concentration on the content of poetic vision is the reward. “Of stars Thou
art the stitch and stallion glow” Marlowe himself would have envied, but since
both terms of the trope, bridge and stars, exclude the human, Crane is
impelled on to extraordinary achievements in hyperbole. When the bridge is
“iridescently upborne / Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins,”
then the human price of Gnosticism begins to mount also. Crane insists that
all this is “to our joy,” but that joy is as dialectical as Shelley’s despair. And
Crane, supremely intelligent, counts the cost, foreknowing all criticism:
Migrations that must needs void memory,
Inventions that cobblestone the heart,—