T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane 353Rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery,
The ancient men—wifeless or runaway
Hobo-trekkers that forever search
An empire wilderness of freight and rails.
Each seemed a child, like me, on a loose perch,
Holding to childhood like some termless play.
John, Jake or Charley, hopping the slow freight
—Memphis to Tallahassee—riding the rods,
Blind fists of nothing, humpty-dumpty clods.The allegory of both poets tells of a child set loose from his moorings; but
discrete elements of erotic feeling are at work in the two passages. The poet’s
distance from the allegory is widened by Eliot as far as possible. It is
narrowed by Crane to an unembarrassed intimacy with the humble materials
from which any cultural myth can be made.
The Bridge,like The Waste Land,is spoken by a man reluctant to
conquer a landscape he imagines in the form of a woman, a landscape which
itself has suffered the assault of earlier generations of men. The king of The
Waste Landowns an inheritance that has shrunk to nothing. At its outer reach
he is dimly conscious of the Thames maidens who “can connect / Nothing
with nothing.” The same intimation of despair is in the familiar landscape of
the child Hart Crane as he watches the hobo-trekkers, but in The Bridgethe
possibility of connection is not despised:
They lurk across her, knowing her yonder breast
Snow-silvered, sumac-stained or smoky blue—
Is past the valley-sleepers, south or west.
—As I have trod the rumorous midnights, too.The narrator of the last line is noticeably mortal, and idiosyncratic in what
he confides, unlike the Tiresias of The Waste Land.
Tiresias was fated to endure sexual experience as a man and a woman,
then punished with blindness by Hera for his report that woman’s pleasure
was greater, and, in compensation, rewarded with the gift of prophecy by
Zeus. His self-knowledge, as the poem presents it, is a version of all
knowledge. “As I have trod the rumorous midnights, too” implies a more
local and personal claim. It is possible that this narrator, too, has known
experience in both sexes. If so he has evidently derived feelings of potency
from both. And if the word rumorousis a further memory of Eliot—“aetherial
rumours / Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus”—the roughs of the