Modern American Poetry

Dice of Drowned Men’s Bones 297

repetition of the event; and the reciprocity that author and reader demand
and project results in the oscillation between their two positions, which is
figured as the bond between those on shore looking out to sea and those still
at sea appealing to the shore.
In the first quatrain, this oscillation is implicated in the recurrent rising
and falling of waves; in the third quatrain, in the lifted gaze of the mariners
as they sink to their deaths:

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,

Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,

Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;

And silent answers crept across the stars.

(Crane, Poems,33)

The vortex imaged in the second quatrain as “The calyx of death’s
bounty” is triumphant here in its expansion to the point of “one vast coil,”
the point of “calm” arrived at beyond the violent competition (“lashings”) of
regressive and progressive currents. This “circuit calm” designates, if not a
moment of rescue, then one of suspension, of reconciliation, which is
induced under the sway of a specifically aesthetic “charm.” The
communication between these starlike “Frosted eyes” and the gazing stars
above them is perhaps an instance of the “new word” Crane speaks of; it is
certainly a “silent” communication, “impossible to actually enunciate,”
which extends the figuration of the author’s appeal to the reader to the
vertical axis Crane invokes when he wrote to Munson about “a resurrection
of some kind.” Here, it is not a matter of exchanging a message between sea
and shore, but between earth and heaven.
Syntactically, the inversion in the third line of the third quatrain—that
is, the placement of “Frosted eyes” before“there were”—suggests a similar
kind of exchange in the construction of the line itself. Compare the
published with the draft version of lines 8 and 9:

Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;

And silent answers crept across the stars.

Some frosted altar there was kept by eyes

Unanswering back across the tangent beams.

One effect of the revision is to eliminate the enjambment and stabilize both
lines as individual units. (The only enjambments in the published text come