Modern American Poetry

(^300) Langdon Hammer
toward paradise.” Both “spindrift” and the odd word—“findrinny”—that it
replaced in Crane’s revision are “new” words from Melville’s Moby-Dick
(Unterecker, Voyager,389); and the sentence they complete is a reimagining of
the conclusion of that book, placing the speaker in the position at once of
Tashtego, the last sailor to be drowned, and of Ishmael, who survives to tell
the story. This is an impossible position in which the poet imagines speaking
both from death and beyond it—as if, by passing through this form of
“negation,” he might affirm his original, “more positive” goal—and it calls to
mind Crane’s contradictory plan to undo the direction modernism had taken
in Eliot’s work. Perhaps the unusual, winding syntax in the subordinate clause,
in which the verb (“Is answered”) supplants and defers the subject (“The seal’s
wide spindrift gaze”), exemplifies the reversal Crane sought; certainly it is a
reordering of grammatical sequence, a substitution of beginning for end
(“cause” for “consequence”), which evokes, in this case, the substitution of life
for death. The poem closes, then, with an image not of the shut “grave,” but
of the open “gaze,” as a visionary action of lifting—or postulation—issues
from the whirlpool of The Waste Land.The “answers” Crane submits here, as
in “At Melville’s Tomb,” are “silent” ones; and the paradise his seal seeks
remains a remote destination. But the structure of Crane’s syntax is such that
the answer (of the grave) precedes the question (of the gaze) with the effect of
affirming, in and through death, the survival of the latter.
The end of “Voyages II” is a striking and deliberate contrast to the end
of “Procession” and other Tate poems that define closure as “death, and
death, and death!” In the final quatrain of “At Melville’s Tomb,” Crane offers
another kind of resurrection. The initial conceit of Crane’s poem—that
Melville is buried at sea—is surprising, but it merely prepares for the more
daring claim that Melville is to be found neither at sea nor on land but in the
“azure steeps” shadowed by the rolling sea.
Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.
(Crane, Poems,33)
Remember Crane’s intention to appropriate “the gifts of the past” (among
them, Eliot’s “erudition and technique”) as “instruments” with which to
catch and fix “the voice of the present.” This Daedalian definition of
language as techneshould be contrasted with “the voice of the present” in the
resonant sentence that ends “General Aims and Theories”: “Language has