Modern American Poetry

Dice of Drowned Men’s Bones 289

Eliot’s vortex returns in “At Melville’s Tomb,” but Crane’s interest is in

the centrifugal force of the whirlpool, its power to cast up and disseminate

traces of the voyage it consumes:

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,

The calyx of death’s bounty giving back

A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,

The portent wound in corridors of shells.

(Crane, Poems,33)

The vortex or whirlpool (in other poems, the waterspout and the hurricane)
symbolizes the rhetorical operations of expanding and compacting, widening
and winding, that structure Crane’s condensed and overtaxed poetry. John
Irwin explains: “In Crane’s verse the metaphoric relationship ‘A is B’ takes by
ellipsis the form of a complex word or phrase ‘AB,’ and this complex word or
phrase becomes in turn part of the metaphoric relationship ‘C is AB,’ and so
on, with mounting complexity.”^10 The will to activate and include all “the
so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the
consciousness” (Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Prose,234) results in the
excess and eliding of references for which Crane’s work remains notorious.
“This crowding of the frame,” Grossman writes, “came to constitute a trope
peculiar to him—not the modernist ‘ambiguity,’ which hierarchizes, or
ironically totalizes a plurality of meanings—but a singularly naive rhetoric of
shadowed wholeness (the impossible simultaneity of all the implications of
desire) that struggles merely to include all meanings in the one space of
appearance” (Grossman, “Crane’s Intense Poetics,” 230). What emerges
from that struggle, the failure of which Crane images as a shipwreck and
descent into the whirlpool, is not “shadowed wholeness” but the isolated
fragments of this whole, “A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph, / The portent
wound in corridors of shells.” This cycle of absorption and redistribution
represents a narrative of poetic composition in which the whole, as it is
engrossed in the part (“the one space of appearance”), which cannot possibly
sustain it, is both torn apart and disseminated. The “wholeness” Crane
envisions is “shadowed,” or “obscured,” precisely in the sense of
“foreshadowed”—still waiting to be constituted and received; its destruction
(simultaneous with its arrival on shore) is also the condition of its
postponement, its transmission as a “portent.” Unlike the “unity of
sensibility” Eliot and Tate looked for in the past, Crane’s deferred harmony
refers to the future.
The distinction can be clarified by examining the difference between