Modern American Poetry

(^288) Langdon Hammer
of certain messages undelivered, mute evidence of certain things,
experiences that the dead mariners might have had to deliver.
Dice as a symbol of chance and circumstance is also implied.
(Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Prose,238)
“Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?” (Melville, Writings of
Herman Melville,Vol. 9, Piazza Tales,45). It is hard not to hear Crane’s gloss
as an affirmative reply to the pained exclamation of the narrator of Melville’s
“Bartleby.” We can see the “dice of drowned men’s bones” as a figure for “the
homosexual text,” in Yingling’s terms, insofar as the “obscurity” imposed on
and by homosexual desire presents a fable for the textualization of the self.
On the one hand, Crane’s mariners cannot deliver their messages—they are
converted to “numbers,” perhaps as Wilde is when he becomes “C 33”; on
the other hand, their experience is precisely and narrowly textual—in code,
accessible only through reading. The writing they do here—their
transmissions of self as text—is identified with dying, and specifically with
death by water. The metaphor follows the consequences of wagering the self
in literary exploit to the marking not of paper, but of bone—as if the attempt
to put oneself into words could only issue in the fragmentation,
formalization, and inscription of the body. Rather than expression, then,
what is recovered is the impression of the transforming medium itself—“the
action of the sea”—which is equated with the pure form manifest in poetic
“numbers.” The mariners of “At Melville’s Tomb” are absorbed into and
changed by a textual process Crane associates with the determinate structure
of metrical order and the nonhuman violence of the waves.
The contrast between Crane’s account of this process and the
drowning of Eliot’s Phlebas, or the erosion of Tate’s headstones in the ode, is
worth contemplating. In Eliot, the death of the handsome sailor removes
him from quest-romance and places him in an archetypal framework from
which his failure could be foreseen. In Tate, the headstones that “yield their
names to the element” figure an effacement of personal identity consistent
with the submission to an ethical order outside the self. In both cases, we
encounter representations of the sacrifice of self that is necessary for the
integration of parts into a whole; whether this whole is imagined as “the
harmony of archetypal spheres,” or the harmony of the so-called traditional
society, it is located in a remote and idealized past. In The Waste Land,the
passage from the present to the past is represented by the regressive vortex
of the whirlpool, a circular movement that reverses the drowned mariner’s
direction, returning Phlebas “through the stages of his age and youth” to a
point at which individuality dissolves into the scholar’s archetype.