(^306) Langdon Hammer
space of enclosure beyond all enclosures, out “beyond the dykes,” where a
“monsoon” cuts across the delta. The cutting action of the hurricane, like the
wind that “flakes” the “sapphire” sky (“breaking up,” Bloom writes, “and yet
also distributing the Shelleyan azure of vision” [Bloom, “Introduction,”
Crane: Critical Views,5]), recalls the mowing of the wind in the first strophe:
The willows carried a slow sound,
A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.
I could never remember
That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
Till age had brought me to the sea.
(Crane, Poems,16)
The actions of mowing, leveling, cutting, and flaking described at the
beginning and end of the poem emphasize that the recovery of origin that
“Repose of Rivers” projects is an apocalyptic event, connecting origin and
end in a vision of unity that is acquired at the cost of a radical reduction of
life, imaged in the grasses Crane has drawn as much from Proverbs as from
Whitman. Still the actual articulation of that unity, like the ineffable present
moment of composition Crane alludes to as “this summer,” remains outside
and beyond the limiting structures of the poem, past “gulf gates.” Beginning
with the images it ends with, therefore, and ending with those it begins with,
“Repose of Rivers” turns on itself in a circulation of figure and energy, a
“circumlocution” that refers us again to Crane’s hurricane and vortex, as well
as to the controlling figure of The Bridge.What emerges from this perpetual
motion is, curiously enough, repose, or “steady” sound, a song that is figured
as a “sarabande,” or dance, both sexual and elemental, and that is also
represented as the “singing” of the pond’s willow rim. Beyond that threshold
is the “absolute music” of “Atlantis.”
NOTES
- Melville, The Writings of Herman Melville,Vol. 3, Mardi, and a Voyage Thither,ed.
Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and
Chicago, 1970), 81. - The history of the publication of White Buildingsis told from the perspective of
Crane’s publisher by Walker Gilmer, Horace Liveright: Publisher of the Twenties(New York,
1970), 129–33. Unterecker mentions, along with the story of Crane’s difficulty getting
White Buildingspublished, an interesting mix-up: “An article by Allen Tate on the
‘Voyages’ set that was intended to accompany the poems in The Guardian,a Philadelphia
magazine, never appeared, although a disastrous advance announcement did,” reading