Modern American Poetry

Dice of Drowned Men’s Bones 305

Crane’s “steep alcoves” as a kind of closet in which homosexual desire has
been confined under a Circean spell. As Bloom remarks, these turtles seem
to recall Melville’s “The Encantadas,” a tale concerning the “emphatic
uninhabitableness” of the Galapagos Islands and, among their unlikely
inhabitants, the gigantic tortoises. These, it is reported, sailors held to be
“wicked sea-officers” transformed after death (“in some cases, before death”)
and about whom there was “something strangely self-condemned” (Melville,
Writings of Melville,Vol. 9, Piazza Tales,128–29).^22 The giant creatures in
Crane’s poem, seen in this light, belong among his other representations of
homosexual banishment, imprisonment, and metamorphosis, from “C 33” to
a cryptic late lyric like “The Mermen” (Crane, Poems,113).^23
But Crane’s anthropomorphic beasts resist the impulse to decode them
in human terms, even psychoanalytic ones, because “Repose of Rivers” is not
an autobiography, but a refusal of autobiography. The poem is about breaking
bounds. Its action is indeed one of “homosexual self-authorization,” but it
identifies Crane’s particular homosexual poetics with boundlessness—or with
the pursuit of boundlessness, a pursuit that overrides the representational
means by which identities are conventionally fixed and counted, including that
of the homosexual. “Repose of Rivers” converts the “negation” under which
homosexuality takes its place in culture—its unrepresentability—into the
motive for a poetry that eschews representational aims. What Crane’s poet
reclaims from his river-voyage, therefore, is a remembrance of thresholds
behind which the object of desire—and reference—is withdrawn, as “the
pond” is supplanted by the poet’s memory of “its singing willow rim.”
Memory supplants event in this poem (“remembrance of steep
alcoves,” not the alcoves themselves), but the memory is not of the past, as
in Tate’s or Eliot’s nostalgic modernism; it is a memory of the futurein which,
Crane says in the fourth strophe, “all things nurse”:

And finally, in that memory all things nurse;

After the city that I finally passed

With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts

The monsoon cut across the delta

At gulf gates ... There, beyond the dykes

I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer,

And willows could not hold more steady sound.

The sexual arts and violence of the city (“scalding unguents,” “smoking
darts”) are a prelude to the poet’s entrance into the gulf, the poem’s ultimate