Modern American Poetry

(^290) Langdon Hammer
Tate’s sense of poetic structure as container and Crane’s sense of poetic
structure as “portent”—as a sign both necessary and inadequate to the
expression of its referent. For example, Harvey Gross has shown the extent
to which the intelligibility of Crane’s poems depends uponverse form—and
particularly meter—to mitigate “uncertain, almost haphazard syntactical
progression.”^11 Gross’s insight is borne out by the poem at hand to the extent
that the multiple figures in the second stanza’s substitutive chain (wrecks—
calyx—chapter—hieroglyph—portent) are organized asa chain and not as a
random series less by logic or grammatical relation than by the catena of
pentameter. This is frequently the state of affairs in Crane’s poems, where
meter takes over the work of grammar in the construction of an elaborate
apostrophe or an extended series of appositive phrases. Yet even metrical
order, however necessary to intelligibility, remained for Crane a compromise
of his intentions. “Poetic structure, whether the phantom modernism of The
Bridgeor the nineteenth-century French formality of ‘The Broken Tower,’
was unaccommodated to [Crane’s] meaning because no structure, the
function of which is to bear meaning into the world of appearance, is free
from the finitizations that are the sufficient condition of appearing at all”
(Grossman, “Crane’s Intense Poetics,” 239).
In “The Broken Tower,” Crane represents the costs of this
compromise, of the “finitizations” attendant on poetic structure, as an
engraving of “Membrane through marrow,” which recalls the inscription of
“numbers” on “the dice of drowned men’s bones.” The “scattered chapter”
that these bones constitute returns, in the same stanza of “The Broken
Tower,” as “my long-scattered score / Of broken intervals” (Crane, Poems,
160). This is, in Crane’s “final” poem, a retrospective reflection on the shape
of Crane’s career, an embittered comment on the intermittency of writing.
But it also describes the disseminative violence that Crane’s poems, from the
beginning, participate in and celebrate. For Crane, the entrance into poetry
is imagined as a breaking or scattering of the whole of his desire, ambition,
identity; it is a passage into structure that is, paradoxically, destructuring.
Verse form, understood here both as abstract pattern and concrete instance,
fragments Crane’s utterance at the same time that it shapes and upholds it.^12
This is fundamentally the paradox of a discourse—a homosexual discourse
for Crane—in which to speak is to be silenced. The point of the poet’s
appearance is also that of his disappearance, and the message of the drowned
is communicated in the moment it is obscured.
“The dice of drowned men’s bones” might be regarded, then, as
emblems of Crane’s own quatrains, which are forms fashioned in the tension
between structure and flux, necessity and “chance,” and which present the