Modern American Poetry

(^348) David Bromwich
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair
and never returned to in the later stanzas, the weight of which nevertheless
carries implicitly through the rest of Eliot’s poem. The closing notes of the
poems differ perhaps by a nuance of decisiveness. Eliot ends with the
amazement or bemusement that was for him at this period a familiar and
almost a reassuring motif: one hears it in nearly the same key at the end of
the monologue “Portrait of a Lady.” By contrast, the sympathy Crane had
begun with deepens, as he turns from this memory to other memories.
The sense that is rich in “My Grandmother’s Love Letters,” of a pity
that touches the poet unaccountably from a slight but charged detail of the
setting, has its own precedent elsewhere in Eliot. The penultimate stanza of
“Preludes” confesses:
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Three further lines close “Preludes” in a vein of average irony—“Wipe your
hand across your mouth, and laugh”—but “My Grandmother’s Love
Letters” includes the fancies as if they would do without a retraction.
“Preludes” is the poem by Eliot that seems most steadily resonant in
Crane’s early work. Comprising discrete impressions of a city—several
perspectives, offered by a “consciousness” or “conscience” not easily
distinguishable into a single person—this poem’s montage tries out the shifts
of tense and mood that will be more gravely performed in The Waste Land.It
covers a matter-of-fact range, not the intensities of Tiresias, without a claim
of supervening authority and without the cues of false or true guidance which
would come later, with the demand of Eliot’s poetry that it be read as
prophetic speech.
For Crane I think the appeal of “Preludes” lay in its intuition of the
city’s unemphatic routine as an incitement to the poet.
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades