Dice of Drowned Men’s Bones 301built towers and bridges, but itself is inevitably as fluid as always” (Crane,
Complete Poems and Selected Prose, 223). As structure or techne, language
operates in time; as “itself,” language operates in the eternity of the
continuous present (“is ... always”), imagined as the fluid and destructured
space of the open sea. Here, in the final quatrain of “At Melville’s Tomb,”
Crane arrives at the point at which instruments (“Compass, quadrant and
sextant”) no longer function but cede control to the medium (“farther tides”)
as it exists by and for itself—the vanishing point of infinity that Crane
designates simply and characteristically by an ellipsis.
In this final quatrain, for the first time in the poem, Crane shifts from
the past into the present tense—a change that is coordinated with Crane’s
elevation of Melville from the place he seems to occupy “beneath the wave”
to somewhere “High in the azure steeps.” As John Hollander observes,
“steeps” takes the place of the rhyming antonym a reader expects: “deep”
(Hollander, Figure of Echo,141), in a final instance of the kind of specular
reversal we have been studying in the poem. The use of the word here
resonates with Crane’s image for the “high” interior of the sea at the
epiphanic center of “Voyages”:
where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,—
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;
Permit me voyage, love, into your hands ...
(Crane, Poems,36)The point where the “floor” of the sea is made “steep” by, or is “flung” by,
the embrace of the lovers “from dawn to dawn,” establishes the enclosed
circuit of a single day in which two bodies, as they submit to “this single
change,” can know “transmemberment” by and in “song.” Crane’s phrase
“azure steeps” reconstitutes this interior space in the air, and identifies the
voyager-lover of “Voyages III” with the voyager-author Melville
(transmembered, once he is finally and fully “steeped” in the medium of his
quest). If, in the third quatrain of “At Melville’s Tomb,” the searching eyes of
the mariners found only the “silent” response of the stars, in the final
quatrain of the poem Crane’s poet is given a vision of human connection
through song, which, although it “will not wake the mariner,” still reconciles
height and depth, present and past.
Crane’s term “monody” places this poet and his poem in the line of
several songs and singers of the past, invoking as it does the subtitles of