Modern American Poetry

(^32) Harold Bloom
Unspeakable Thou Bridge to Thee, O Love.
Thy pardon for this history, whitest Flower,
O Answerer of all,—Anemone,—
Now while thy petals spend the suns about us, hold—
(O Thou whose radiance doth inherit me)
Atlantis, hold thy floating singer late!
Would it make a difference if this read: “Cathay, hold thy floating
singer late!” so that the prayer of pariah would belong to Columbus and not
to Orpheus? Yes, for the final stanza then would have the Orphic strings leap
and converge to a question clearly different:
—One Song, one Bridge of Fire! Is it Atlantis,
Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring
The serpent with the eagle in the leaves ...?
Crane’s revision of the Orphic stance of White Buildingshere allows
him a difference that is a triumph. His serpent and eagle are likelier to be
Shelley’s than Nietzsche’s, for they remain at strife withintheir border of
covenant, the ring of rainbows. Atlantis is urged to hold its Orpheus late, as
a kind of newly fused Platonic myth of reconcilement to a higher world of
forms, a myth of which Gnosticism was a direct heir. “Is it Cathay?,”
repeating the noble delusion of Columbus, is not a question hinting defeat,
but foreboding victory. Yet Orphic victories are dialectical, as Crane well
knew. Knowledge indeed is the kernel, for Crane astutely shows awareness of
what the greatest poets always know, which is that their figurations intend
the will’s revenge against time’s “it was,” but actually achieve the will’s limits,
in the bewilderments of the Abyss of troping and of tropes.
The coda to Crane’s poetry, and his life, is “The Broken Tower,” where
the transumption of the Orphic quest does allow a final triumph:
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
Crane mentions reading other books by Pater, but not the unfinished
novel Gaston de Latour. Its first few chapters, at least, would have fascinated
him, and perhaps he did look into the opening pages, where the young
Gaston undergoes a ceremony bridging the spirit and nature: