Modern American Poetry

(^298) Langdon Hammer
in the first and fourth quatrains, deferring the objects of the verbs
“bequeath” and “contrive.”) The other effects produced by the exchange of
“altars” and “eyes” acrossline 8 are more subtle. Even the process by which
Crane came to a final version of this line enacts the sort of substitution, the
reciprocity and reversibility, that the line itself evokes: one feels that, in
whatever order Crane deploys them, there will be “eyes” and “altars” here so
long as subject and object continue to reciprocally sustain each other across
the line—which, as Crane’s placement, in both cases, of “eyes” and “altars”
at each end suggests, is itself “a tangent beam.”
The revision shifts Crane’s sentence from the passive to the active
voice, as it introduces the key verb “lift,” and so gives definite expression to
Crane’s faith that (as he said to Monroe) “a man, not knowing perhaps a
definite god yet being endowed with a reverence for deity—such a man
naturally postulates a deity somehow, and the altar of that deity simply by the
very actionof the eyes liftedin searching” (Crane, Complete Poems and Selected
Prose,239). In Crane’s gloss, it is “the eyes,” not “altars,” that are “lifted.”
The grammatical shift that comes with Crane’s rendering of the line into
prose again enacts the reciprocity we are concerned with, which, in Crane’s
account of his “faith,” is understood as the power of the human subject to
construct, of its own action, the object of its desire. This is a “mystic” claim,
validating stylistic, spiritual, and sexual goals disallowed in the theory and
practice of Crane’s peers. The phrase “definite god” specifically recalls
Crane’s refusal of the demand—central to Tate’s literary criticism—for
“definite knowledge”; and “the eyes liftedin searching”—rejecting Eliot’s
skepticism as well as his later orthodoxy—approve the autodidact’s decision
to proceed without “precepts or preconceptions.” Whether the stars give
“silent answers” to these searchers or are “Unanswering,” is a question that
the poem does less to resolve than to retain in suspension.
This state of suspension is momentarily audible in the metrical
structure of Crane’s line. I mentioned, early on, the tension between iambic
and trochaic impulses in the first line. In the revision of line 8, Crane not
only moves from a passive to an active construction, but from an iambic to a
trochaic pattern. The draft version, “Some frosted altar there was kept by
eyes,” is consistent with the iambic scheme of the whole, whereas the
published text, “Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars,” introduces a line
of trochaic pentameter. In this strongly iambic context, the alternation
represents a halt, a moment of resistance or reversal, before the meter of line
9, “And silent answers crept across the stars,” returns the poem to its
normative cadence (and emphasizes, by contrast, the dominance of that
cadence). The metrical alternation is itself a structure of inversion, then,