Modern American Poetry

The Shadow of a Myth 81

deteriorated noticeably,^9 Crane searched for a way to acknowledge the
unhappy reality of America without surrendering his faith. The changes he
made in the final poem of the sequence—the poem he had begun in 1923 and
altered time and again—disclose the accommodation he reached.
At first, as I have indicated, the finale projected an intense experience
of harmony. As his conception of the bridge took shape, he changed the
ending accordingly, weaving into it the major images developed earlier,
which are mainly nautical and musical. He reorganized the section into a
walk across the bridge, and incorporated many structural details of the cables
and towers. “I have attempted to induce the same feelings of elation, etc.—
like being carried forward and upward simultaneously—both in imagery,
rhythm and repetition, that one experiences in walking across my beloved
Brooklyn Bridge.”

Through the bound cable strands, the arching path

Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,—

Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate

The whispered rush, telepathy of wires.

Up the index of night, granite and steel—

Transparent meshes—fleckless the gleaming staves—

Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream

As though a god were issue of the strings....

* * *

Sheerly the eyes, like seagulls strung with rime—

Slit and propelled by glistening fins of light—

Pick biting way up towering looms that press

Sidelong with flight of blade on tendon blade

—Tomorrows into yesteryear—and link

What cipher-script of time no traveller reads

Rhythm and imagery convey a real bridge as well as an “arc synoptic”: the

walk across the span recapitulates the experience of the concluding day.

In stanza six, at the center of the roadway, the poet attains his vision. It

is midnight; night is lifted “to cycloramic crest/ Of deepest day.” Now, as

“Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage,” the bridge becomes a “Choir, translating time/

Into what multitudinous Verb”: it is “Psalm of Cathay!/ O Love, thy white

pervasive Paradigm ...!” This moment is the climax of the poem. In the six

stanzas which follow, Crane interprets the “multitudinous Verb” as the

explicit action of reaching Cathay. He achieves this through predominant