Modern American Poetry

(^78) Alan Trachtenberg
And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon ... Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.
O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,—
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year ...
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
The setting of “Proem” in the harbor and lower Manhattan area is
distinct, though the point of view shifts a good deal within this area, from a
long view of the Bay and the Statue of Liberty, to an office in a skyscraper,
down an elevator into the street, into a dark movie house, and then to the
sun-bathed bridge. The view of the bridge also changes, from “across the
harbor,” in which the sun appears to be walking up the diagonal stays, to the
promenade and towers as the bedlamite “speeds to thy parapets.” Later the
point of view is under the bridge, in its shadow. The shifting perspectives
secure the object in space; there is no question that it is a bridge across a river
between two concretely realized cities.
At the same time, the bridge stands apart from its setting, a world of its
own. A series of transformations in the opening stanzas bring us to it. We begin
with a seagull at dawn—a specific occurrence, yet eternal (“How many dawns”).
The bird’s wings leave our eyes as an “inviolate curve” (meaning unprofaned as
well as unbroken) to become “apparitional as sails” (apparitional implies