Modern American Poetry

(^84) Alan Trachtenberg
inspiring the revived theme of the Northwest Passage in the nineteenth
century, and Atlantis even yet arousing speculation. Crane had indicated
early in the composition of his poem that Cathay would stand for
“consciousness, knowledge, spiritual unity”—material conquest transmuted
into “an attitude of spirit.” What does Atlantis stand for?
The answer is complex. When we learn from Plato that the Atlanteans
possessed a land with a great central plain, “said to have been the fairest of
all plains, and very fertile,” the resemblance to America is striking. Further,
we learn that they were a race of highly inventive builders, who intersected
the island with a vast system of inland canals. They had invented basic tools,
farming, and the alphabet. Their proudest creations, however, were
bridges—a series of bridges, in fact, which led over the canals toward the
exact center of the island. There, a monumental bridge opened upon the gate
to a temple, the shrine of Poseidon.
This was Atlantis in its glory. But, Plato revealed, the glory did not last.
The “divine portion” faded away, and human nature “got the upper hand.”
The people grew prideful, avaricious, imperialistic. And most of all, they
grew blind to their own failings—blind to the loss of their true powers.
Crane wove references to the sunken island throughout the fabric of
the poem. They appear in “Cutty Sark” as the old sailor’s memory of “the
skeletons of cities.” They recur forcefully in “The Tunnel” in two echoes of
Poe’s “The City in the Sea”; “And Death, aloft,—gigantically down,” and
“worlds that glow and sink.” And they emerge explicitly in stanza eleven of
the finale:
Now while thy petals spend the suns about us, hold—
(O Thou whose radiance doth inherit me)
Atlantis,—hold thy floating singer late!
In the preceding line, the bridge was addressed as a sea creature—
“Anemone.” Here, the poet invokes the floating form, now called Atlantis, to
sustain his faith. In the following stanza, the last of the poem, the poet passes
“to thine Everpresence, beyond time,” as the “orphic strings ... leap and
converge.” Then:
—One Song, one Bridge of Fire! Is it Cathay,
Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring
The serpent with the eagle in the leaves ...?
Whispers antiphonal in azure swing.