Modern American Poetry

Dice of Drowned Men’s Bones 299

which interrupts, if it does not really suspend, the progress of the poem at
that moment when the mariners, fixing their eyes on the stars, can still resist
the fact of drowning.
Crane’s poems create enclosed spaces that offer no shelterbecause the
structural features of their enclosure (the specular identity of eyes and stars,
the chiasmatic exchange of sea and shore, the simultaneity of past and
present visions) are figures for an endless and impossible circulation. This
circulation is sometimes represented in Crane’s poems as the poet’s power to
speak to readers from beyond the grave. In the fragment beginning, “So
dream thy sails, O phantom bark,” whose pentameter quatrains make it an
uncanny companion piece to “At Melville’s Tomb,” Crane imagines a power
of posthumous speech such that “I thy drowned men may speak again”
(Crane, Poems,214)—a phrase that, again according to an Elizabethan
formula, equivocates as to whether “drowned men” is an appositive subject
or an object (i.e., the poet may be speaking asor on behalfof “thy drowned
men”). The position of the posthumous speaker in this and other Crane
poems is not like that of Whitman’s poet in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,”
whose life in time is perpetuated by the poem’s enduring power to address a
future audience, but like that of Dickinson’s poet in “I heard a Fly buzz—
when I died—,” whose speech comes to us from a station outside of time, a
place that Crane and Dickinson both call “Eternity.”^19 Unlike Whitman’s
democratic address to the crowd, the mode of address Crane shares with
Dickinson is strangely private or elite, intimating, as Crane puts it in his
sonnet “To Emily Dickinson,” “Some reconcilement of remotest mind”
(Crane, Poems,128).
This remote “reconcilement” is the kind of agreement between poet
and reader that Crane looks for in “At Melville’s Tomb,” in which Crane
imagines reading as the recovery of a message the drowned “bequeath.” In
“Voyages II,” we encounter another bequest, only this time the speaker of
Crane’s poem is not the inheritor but that which is inherited:

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.

O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,

Bequeath us to no earthly shore until

Is answered in the vortex of our grave

The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

(Crane, Poems,35)

To be bound “in time” is to be bound by a vortex consuming and renewing
the self as it casts up, out of time, as bequest, “The seal’s wide spindrift gaze