Modern American Poetry

(^304) Langdon Hammer
Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them
Asunder ...
How much I would have bartered! the black gorge
And all the singular nestings in the hills
Where beavers learn stitch and tooth.
The pond I entered once and quickly fled—
I remember now its singing willow rim.
(Crane, Poems,16)
These are all sites of seduction—versions, perhaps, of possible “homes”—
which threaten to draw the poet down and “into” their enigmatic enclosures.
The human experience in this narrative is highly fraught, and hard to
decode, but Harold Bloom provides a good starting place: “Embowered by
steep alcoves of cypresses, intensifying the dominant noon sun, Crane nearly
yields to the sexual phantasmagoria of ‘flags, weeds,’ and the sound play
alcoves / almost intensifies the narrowness of the escape from a primary
sexuality, presumably an incestuous heterosexuality.” In Bloom’s account,
what Crane “would have bartered, indeed did barter, was nature for poetry,”
in such a way as to relate “the inevitability of sexual orientation to the
assumption of his poethood” (Bloom, “Introduction,” Crane: Critical Views,
4–5). This is useful, because it defines the relation between Crane’s poetry
and his sexuality by the opposition to “nature” that they share, linking
Crane’s rejection of his place as son in the Oedipal succession to his
“unnatural,” visionary poetics, a way of writing that was always a refusal to
reproduce the world as he found it.
For this reason, homosexuality is difficult to find on the level of plot.
As Yingling explains, building on the readings of Bloom and Robert K.
Martin, “Repose of Rivers” does not “depict an actual relationship between
two men; it focuses instead on the problem of homosexual self-authorization
as an issue of internal resolution where one comes to maturity through a
rejection of Oedipal models of development and an adoption of homosexual
ones” (Yingling, Crane and the Homosexual Text,139). With this genetic
model in mind, Yingling reads the “mammoth turtles” of the second strophe
as emblems of “Oedipal masculinity,” enacting sexuality as a drama of
“division and competition” under the “tyranny” of the midday sun, “a trope
for the overpowering but false authority of patriarchal reality” (Yingling,
Crane and the Homosexual Text,141). This is compatible with Bloom’s
reading, in which the scene calls up the lure and threat of “a primary
sexuality, presumably an incestuous heterosexuality.” But one could also view