Dice of Drowned Men’s Bones 285starts, repeated beginnings; in “At Melville’s Tomb,” Crane claims that
discontinuity as a sign of generative power and a principle of historical
connection.
The vision Melville and Crane share—“wide from this ledge”—
introduces an expanded field of possibility. “Wide” is a peculiarly Cranean
modifier, a positionalterm, implying breadth, lateral movement, and scope. It
points to both separation and extension, and it turns up repeatedly in Crane’s
poems about the sea, which are also poems about Crane’s relation to
nineteenth-century American male authors like Melville and Whitman.
“Wide” (sometimes “widening” or “wider”) occurs four times in “Voyages,”
once in “The Harbor Dawn” and in “Ave Maria,” and twice more in both
“The River” and “Cape Hatteras.” In “Voyages I,” the word describes the
danger of engulfment by “caresses / Too lichen-faithful from too wide a
breast” (Crane, Poems,34); and in “Voyages II,” this threat is matched and
overcome by “The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise” (Crane, Poems,
35).
Here, in the first line of “At Melville’s Tomb,” “wide” describes the
poet’s latitude of vision across the extrasocial space of the sea, a place without
limits, of “rimless floods, unfettered leewardings” (“Voyages II” [Crane,
Poems, 35]), an imaginative domain very different from the strictly
circumscribed and highly structured space of Tate’s cemetery.^9 The sea’s
boundaries, defined by the tides, are continually in flux; as Crane imagines it,
the sea is destructive—or not so much destructive as destructuring, a
medium of transformation, process, and change. For these reasons, as Lee
Edelman has argued, the sea in Crane’s poems can be discussed in Lacanian
terms as a “maternal” space unmediated by—and unconstrained by—the
symbolic coordinates of the Father (Edelman, Transmemberment of Song,
135–37). In the fragment “The Sea Raised Up,” from the winter of 1927, the
sea is the site of a regressive, incestual fantasy of union, collapsing male poet
and mother in the compound identity “—me—her”:
The sea raised up a campanile ... The wind I heard
Of brine partaking, whirling into shower
Of column that breakers sheared in shower.
Back into bosom, —me—her, into natal power ...
(Crane, Poems,213)The “natal power” spoken of here is a mother tongue; it suggests that the
anachronistic language of Crane’s high style is not (in contrast to the “grand
manner” Tate coveted) a language of the fathers. Rather, it is a transgressive