Modern American Poetry

T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane 347

It is all hung by an invisible white hair.

It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

“Are your fingers long enough to play

Old keys that are but echoes:

Is the silence strong enough

To carry back the music to its source

And back to you again

As though to her?”

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand

Through much of what she would not understand;

And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof

With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

I would,the phrase that governs the last several stanzas of Eliot’s poem, is
displaced by Crane to the last four lines; the entire closing montage of “La
Figlia che Piange,” with its surprising sudden exterior (a scene of both pathos
and indifference), has been miraculously condensed. Crane has the same
need to find “Some way incomparably light and deft, / Some way we both
should understand” to connect person with person and present with past.
Hence the difficult question he asks himself: whether he is strong enough
“To carry back the music to its source / And back to you again / As though
to her?” The phenomenal life of the world, which continues untroubled as
before, at the ends of both of these poems may be a sign that the connection
has not been achieved.
“La Figlia che Piange” and “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” are
linked more subtly by a seasonal counterpoint, Eliot’s poem starting in spring
and passing into autumn, Crane’s set in an autumn that looks back on
someone else’s spring. There are resonances too between the sunlit and
moonlit spaces in which the poems create their distinctive moods of stillness.
And (the detail that feels most like conscious allusion) the separate line of
“My Grandmother’s Love Letters,”

It is all hung by an invisible white hair

recalls a line repeated in Eliot’s opening stanza,