Modern American Poetry

(^284) Langdon Hammer
mean more than his livelihood. Both of these quests, being dedicated to
absolute satisfactions, necessarily encounter defeat, imagined as shipwreck,
or as a writer’s production of an unread (perhaps an unreadable) text.
Weaver’s Melville remains true to the “untamed desires” of his youth, but at
the cost of becoming “the Devil’s Advocate,” a novelist created in the image
of the Satanic Poet willing to commit himself to hell rather than repent. It is
a version of the story Tate tells about Keats and Crane, but unlike Tate,
Weaver does not endorse moral “realism”; Melville is for Weaver a tragic
figure because he keeps faith with his desires, not because he gives them up.
This is the moral, and history of Crane’s Melville too. But to refuse to
repent, to abandon the consolations of “home,” is not, in Crane’s poem, to
cut oneself off from all bonds; it is to enter into a different kind of
community, a league of “drowned men,” from which it is possible to draw
hope. In the first stanza of Crane’s poem, the persistence of this community
across time, even in “defeat,” is figured in the repeated action of the waves as
they rise and fall, breaking on the shore.
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
(Crane, Poems,33)
The trochaic substitutions in the first and fourth feet of line 1 introduce a
tension between iambic and trochaic schemes, the metrical norm and its
reversal, which, as we will see, is encoded on another level in Crane’s images
of rising and falling, lifting and sinking. In this first instance the metrical
alternation, a movement of arrest and renewal, is coordinated with the action
of the waves. The trochaic word “Often” locates this action in time while the
phrase “wide from this ledge” locates it in space. That initial phrase invokes
a recurring possibility of vision—at once enduring anddiscontinuous—of the
kind invoked in the first line of The Bridge:“How many dawns, chill from his
rippling rest” (Crane, Poems, 43). In fact, the beginning of The Bridge
specifically reworks the beginning of Crane’s draft, “How many times the
jewelled dice spoke.”^8 In both cases, Crane begins a poem in such a way as
to place his own action within a seriesof beginnings. The effect, here, is to
emphasize the continuity between Crane’s and Melville’s perspectives even as
it emphasizes the discontinuity, or seriality, of this perspective as such. In the
preface to White Buildings, Tate faults Crane’s “masters”—Whitman,
Melville, and Poe—for establishing only a discontinuous tradition of false