The Shadow of a Myth 79“epiphanal” as well as spectral and subjective). Then, in a further transmutation,
they become a “page of figures.” As the wings leave our eyes, so does the page:
“filed away.” Then, elevators “drop us” from the bird to the street. In the shift
from bird to page to elevator, we have witnessed the transformation of a curve
into a perpendicular, of an organism into a mechanism—wings into a list of
numbers. “Filed away,” the vision of the curve, identified with “sails” and
voyages, has been forgotten (“How many” times?), like a page of reckonings.
The quest for a vision of bird and sails resumes in the cinema, but, as in Plato’s
cave, the “flashing scene” is “never disclosed.” Then, the eye finds a permanent
vision of the curve in the “silver-paced” bridge.
The bridge has emerged from a counterpoint of motions (bird vs.
elevator; sails vs. “multitudes bent”) as an image of self-containment.
Surrounded by a frantic energy (“some flashing scene ... hastened to again”;
“A bedlamite speeds ...”) the bridge is aloof; its motions express the sun.
Verbs like drop, tilt, leak, submerge describe the city; the bridge is rendered
by verbs like turn, breathe, lift, sweep. Established in its own visual plane,
with a motion of its own, the bridge is prepared, by stanza seven, to receive
the epithets of divinity addressed to it. Like Mary, it embraces, reprieves, and
pardons. Its cables and towers are “harp and altar.” The lights of traffic along
its roadway, its “unfractioned idiom,” seem to “condense eternity.” Finally, as
night has extinguished the cities and thereby clarified the shadow of the
bridge, its true meaning becomes clear: its “curveship” represents an
epiphany, a myth to manifest the divine. Such at least is what the poet
implores the bridge to be.
In “Proem,” Brooklyn Bridge achieves its status in direct opposition to
the way of life embodied in the cities. Bridge and city are opposing and
apparently irreconcilable forms of energy. This opposition, which is
equivalent to that between myth and history, continues through the
remainder of the poem; it creates the local tensions of each section, and the
major tension of the entire work.
This tension is best illustrated in “The Tunnel,” the penultimate
section of the poem. After a fruitless search for reality in a Times Square
theater, the protagonist boards a subway as “the quickest promise home.”
The short ride to Brooklyn Bridge is a nightmare of banal conversations and
advertisements: “To brush some new presentiment of pain.” The images are
bizarre: “and love/ A burnt match skating in a urinal.” Poe appears, his head
“swinging from the swollen strap,” his eyes “Below the toothpaste and the
dandruff ads.” The crucified poet, dragged to his death through the streets
of Baltimore, “That last night on the ballot rounds,” represents how society
uses its visionary devotees of beauty.^7