Dice of Drowned Men’s Bones 303“At Melville’s Tomb” was probably completed before Crane came to live
with Tate and Gordon in December 1925. Blaming Gordon for the dispute
that made him leave four months later, Crane told Underwood, in a postcard
from Cuba, that she and Tate were jealous over the money Kahn had given
him to work on The Bridge;they had gossiped about him with other friends,
he said, and betrayed his “faith” in them, causing Crane in turn to lose “faith”
in the “material” of The Bridge. “It’s all been very tiresome—,” Crane
complained, “and I’d rather lose such elite for the old society of vagabonds
and sailors—who don’t enjoy chitchat” (Crane, Letters,264). With the sailor,
in contrast to that “elite,” “no faith or such is properly expectedand how jolly
and cordial and warm the tonsiling issometimes, after all” (Crane, Letters,
264). Crane would return several times to Mrs. Turner’s house in
Patterson—Tate and Gordon left in the summer of 1926—and he returned
to Brooklyn as well. But Crane remained in no place long—and for the most
part he remained unemployed—during the final five years of his life (a period
Crane spent in Cuba, New York, Connecticut, Ohio, California, England,
France, and Mexico in rented rooms, in the homes of friends and family, on
trains, and aboard ships).
The state of exposure and mobility that Crane chose when he left for
Cuba in 1926 is the subject of “Repose of Rivers.”^21 The poem’s alliterative
title introduces antithetical terms, linking stasis and motion, the singular and
the plural, in anticipation of the oxymoronic figures that dominate the poem.
There is in “Repose,” I think, a connotation of putting things backinto
place—as if Crane’s use of the word were modeled on “return.” But what is
returned to here—the great mouth of the river, where the river meets the sea
and is absorbed by it—is not an origin but an end. The poem is an account
of a career, identifying the course of the poet with that of a river, through the
ancient association of eloquence with fluency, and the progress it traces is a
story of immersion in the liquid Crane called “language itself,” an itinerary—
at once homosexual and visionary—that concludes at the point of the
speaker’s engulfment.
Because the power of poetic utterance depends, in the mythology of
this poem, on its unimpeded flow, the seaward course of the river-poet
requires him to resist or escape from a series of traps. These are the burden
of the second and third strophes:
Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves
Where cypresses shared the noon’s
Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.
And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams