Modern American Poetry

(^72) Alan Trachtenberg
close to “the most beautiful Bridge of the world.” He crossed the bridge
often, alone and with friends, sometimes with lovers: “the cables enclosing us
and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can
walk with another.” Part III of Faustus and Helenhad been set in the shadow
of the bridge, “where,” Crane wrote, “the edge of the bridge leaps over the
edge of the street.” In the poem the bridge is the “Capped arbiter of beauty
in this street,” “the ominous lifted arm/ That lowers down the arc of Helen’s
brow.” Its “curve” of “memory” transcends “all stubble streets.”
Crane tried to keep Brooklyn Bridge always before him, in eye as well
as in mind. In April 1924 he wrote: “I am now living in the shadow of the
bridge.” He had moved to 110 Columbia Heights, into the very house, and
later, the very room occupied fifty years earlier by Roebling. Like the
crippled engineer, the poet was to devote his most creative years to the vision
across the harbor. In his imagination the shadow of the bridge deepened into
the shadow of a myth.
I
The Bridge,Crane wrote, “carries further the tendencies manifest in ‘F
and H.’” These tendencies included a neo-Platonic conception of a “reality”
beyond the evidence of the senses. The blind chaos of sensation in the
modern city apparently denies this transcendent reality, but a glimpse of it is
available, through ecstasy, to the properly devout poet. Helen represents the
eternal, the unchanging; Faustus, the poet’s aspiration; and the “religious
gunman” of Part III, spirit of the Dionysian surrender (sexual as well as
aesthetic) necessary for a vision of the eternal. The threefold image
constitutes what Kenneth Burke has called an “aesthetic myth”—a modern
substitute for “religious myth.”^2 The poet’s impulse toward beauty is a mark
of divinity. A part of the myth, and another “tendency” of the poem, is what
Crane called its “fusion of our time with the past.” The past is represented
by the names Faustus and Helen; the present by the data of the poem: the
“memoranda,” the “baseball scores,” and “stock quotations” of Part I; the
jazz dance of Part II; the warplanes of Part III. The present fails to live up to
the past. But the poet, a “bent axle of devotion,” keeps his “lone eye” riveted
upon Helen; he offers her “one inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.” At the
end, in communion with the “religious gunman,” he accepts and affirms past
and present, the “years” whose “hands” are bloody; he has attained “the
height/ The imagination spans beyond despair.”
The idea of a bridge is explicit in the closing image; earlier, as I have
indicated, it had appeared in fact, leaping over the street. In the projected