Dice of Drowned Men’s Bones 287which is figured, in subsequent stanzas, in Crane’s vortical images of “shells,”
“calyx,” and “coil.” These are images of the structure of the poem itself,
because the poem’s circular forms, its inward “corridors of shells,” represent in
spatial terms the vision Crane and Melville—and Crane’s reader—share across
time. That vision is discontinuous, despite its endurance across time, because
it is continually passing—and continually renewed—with every reading of the
poem. Meaning is repeatedly promised and deferred in Crane’s poems; it is
virtual, preludial, prospective—intended to increase “our consciousness of
what is involved in the effort to increase our consciousness”; and it is carried
to shore, like “the dice of drowned men’s bones,” only in the moment before
it is “obscured.”
Lewis describes Crane’s aims (“Fresh concepts, more inclusive
evaluations”) by quoting from Crane’s own statement of them in “A Letter
to Harriet Monroe,” a reply to the editor of Poetry,which appeared in the
magazine with “At Melville’s Tomb” in October 1926. The obscurity of
Crane’s meanings, apparently, had made the poem all but unpublishable; it
circulated for almost a year before Monroe, somewhat grudgingly,
accommodated it along with Crane’s explanation. That explanation is, as he
knew it would be, Crane’s most widely known performance as a critic and
theorist, and it bears the strain of Crane’s obligation to prove his
sophistication, intelligence, and good faith to several audiences at once.
Privately, Crane ridiculed Monroe; “Aunt Harriet” was a recurrent figure of
fun in communications with Tate. Crane’s antipathy toward Monroe, as well
as Moore, whom he called names like “the Rt. Rev. Miss Mountjoy” (Crane,
Letters,218), leagued him with other modernist men. In his letter to Monroe,
Crane took the side of his male colleagues by defending modernist
“difficulty” against genteel standards, which are seen here as, at least
implicitly, female ones. But one function of Crane’s obscurity, as of his
misogyny, was to disguise his sexual desires, and this motive divided him
from Tate and Monroe both. Defending obscurity, Crane was defending his
right to a language in which the unspeakable could be spoken.
Crane’s metaphor “the dice of drowned men’s bones” vexed Monroe
particularly. Crane’s gloss remains cogent:
Dice bequeath an embassy, in the first place, by being ground (in
this connection only, of course) in little cubes from the bones of
drowned men by the action of the sea, and are finally thrown up
on the sand, having “numbers” but no identification. These being
the bones of dead men who never completed their voyage, it
seems legitimate to refer to them as the only surviving evidence