Episode of Hands -- Hart Crane

Guest poem submitted by Mark Penney:

(Poem #1837) Episode of Hands The unexpected interest made him flush. Suddenly he seemed to forget the pain,-- Consented,--and held out One finger from the others. The gash was bleeding, and a shaft of sun That glittered in and out among the wheels, Fell lightly, warmly, down into the wound. And as the fingers of the factory owner's son, That knew a grip for books and tennis As well as one for iron and leather,-- As his taut, spare fingers wound the gauze Around the thick bed of the wound, His own hands seemed to him Like wings of butterflies Flickering in the sunlight over summer fields. The knots and notches,--many in the wide Deep hand that lay in his,--seemed beautiful. They were like the marks of wild ponies' play,-- Bunches of new green breaking a hard turf. And factory sounds and factory thoughts Were banished from him by that larger, quieter hand That lay in his with the sun upon it. and as the bandage knot was tightened The two men smiled into each other's eyes. -- Hart Crane

Where do you start with this beautiful poem?

Two men, described only through their hands, meet and briefly connect.  By
the way the hands are described, you know they're from vastly different
worlds, but both pairs of hands are beautiful (differently).  As the
front-office boy bandages the worker's wounded hand, a link of common
humanity is formed -- all wordlessly.  Each of them forgets who he is and
where he is, and simply becomes a fellow human being.  The bandage is, in
many ways, what knots them together.  That, and the smile, of course.

It has a certain feel of parable about it, starting with that epigrammatic
and unforgettable title, "Episode of Hands."

Of course, you're seeing the whole thing from the white-collar guy's point
of view -- Crane really did work in the front office of his father's factory
for a time -- so there are certainly questions you can ask: is it
politically too naive? is it, instead, elitist?  Also, I'd be remiss in not
pointing out that this poem is Exhibit A if you want to talk about Crane as
a gay poet, since here (for once) that particular subtext doesn't require
ridiculous leaps of logic to read in.  But you don't need to talk about any
of those things -- save that for the classroom.  As a reader, this stream of
quietly beautiful, creative images is enough.  Hands as butterflies.  Hands
as open fields, complete with horses running in them.  Hands as a microcosm
of what makes us human.

Notice also how the light -- striking the wound, as if washing it, filtering
in through the wheels (gears, etc., in the factory) -- is curative, and
seems itself to banish the sounds of the factory, to suggest or even create
the outdoor images that Crane uses.  Also, with the light comes a complete
absence of sound.  The bond between the two is almost necessarily wordless
-- a bandage, a shaft of light, an exchange of smiles.  The quiet of the
poem is palpable -- it's part of what makes it great.

I love Hart Crane like crazy, and this poem is one of the reasons why.

Mark.

Voyages - I -- Hart Crane

Guest poem submitted by Mark Penney:

(Poem #1597) Voyages - I Above the fresh ruffles of the surf Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand. They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks, And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed Gaily digging and scattering. And in answer to their treble interjections The sun beats lightning on the waves, The waves fold thunder on the sand; And could they hear me I would tell them: O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog, Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached By time and the elements; but there is a line You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast. The bottom of the sea is cruel. -- Hart Crane

Comment:

The archives have strangely neglected Hart Crane; there's been just one of
his poems before.  He died very young (32) and his oeuvre is small -- the
Complete Poems of Hart Crane is just 250 pages -- but still, it seems weird
to ignore one of the seminal poets of the first half of the 20th century.

Crane is one of those people (Sylvia Plath is another, Rimbaud too) where
knowing the poet's biography hugely changes the way you read the poetry.
But ignore what you know about HC for a moment (if you know anything at all,
that is), because this is a great poem even without reading Crane's life
into it.  I love the way this poem captures the fundamental innocence of
children playing on the beach, while simultaneously pointing out the
inherent lack of innocence in the scene.  Even the kids' play itself is less
than innocent: "conquest," "scattering," "crumble," etc.; and they're
playing with sticks "bleached by time and the elements."  The surf and the
sun, normally pleasant images, are transformed by Crane into a thunderstorm.
The third stanza, of course, gives you the reason for all this
transformation of a happy day at the beach into a grim foreboding:  "there
is a line you must not cross," for the sea will seduce you and then drown
you.

"The bottom of the sea is cruel" has a grim certainty about it that
contrasts mightily with the fluidity of all the imagery that comes before
it.  It's almost like the poem is betraying you, in the same way that the
speaker says that the sea will.

Is the speaker of the poem being overprotective?  Overly worried about these
kids?  How, after all, can he know from experience that "the bottom of the
sea is cruel"?  Or is the sea being used as a metaphor for lost innocence in
a larger sense?  I love the ambiguities in this poem.

And then there's the fact that when Crane wrote the "Voyages" sequence (this
poem and five others that follow it) he was having an affair with a Danish
sailor.  "There is a line you must not cross"?  Oodles of ink have been used
up, in academic circles, arguing about what "Voyages" might or might not
have to say on the subject of homosexuality.  And then there's the eerie
fact that Crane committed suicide by jumping off a ship . . . You see what I
mean about how the biography changes the poem.

--Mark

To Brooklyn Bridge -- Hart Crane

Guest poem sent in by Aseem Kaul

(Poem #1101) To Brooklyn Bridge How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him, Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty-- Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes As apparitional as sails that cross Some page of figures to be filed away; --Till elevators drop us from our day . . . I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene Never disclosed, but hastened to again, Foretold to other eyes on the same screen; And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced As though the sun took step of thee, yet left Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,-- Implicitly thy freedom staying thee! Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets, Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning, A jest falls from the speechless caravan. Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks, A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene; All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . . Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still. And obscure as that heaven of the Jews, Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow Of anonymity time cannot raise: Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show. O harp and altar, of the fury fused, (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!) Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge, Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,-- Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars, Beading thy path--condense eternity: And we have seen night lifted in thine arms. Under thy shadow by the piers I waited; Only in darkness is thy shadow clear. The City's fiery parcels all undone, Already snow submerges an iron year . . . O Sleepless as the river under thee, Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod, Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend And of the curveship lend a myth to God. -- Hart Crane

The first thing that always strikes me about this poem is the way it
bristles with movement - reading it I am constantly aware of a dim
sensation of either rising into a sky brilliant with phrases or falling
into a helpless gravity (it's seldom that I step into a lift now without
the line "elevators drop us from our day" popping into my head); and I'm
enthralled by the way even something as fundamentally stationary as a
bridge becomes a moving object: a step, a curve, a trajectory.

The other fascinating thing about it of course, is the delicate balance
Crane manages to strike between the divine and the industrial - the
poem is filled with mundane, metallic images - girders, derricks, iron,
acetylene - but the poem somehow lifts them all into a different plane, so
that Quixote like, we see the bridge and the derricks not simply for what
they are but rather as Titans, as Gods mighty and merciless.

Aseem

P.S. Searching through the Minstrel Archives I find (to my horror!)
that none of Hart Crane's poems have ever been run on Minstrels. I'm
including therefore a brief biography of the man:

 Born in 1899 in Garrettsville, Ohio, Harold Hart Crane was a highly anxious
 and volatile child. He began writing verse in his early teenage years, and
 though he never attended college, read regularly on his own, digesting the
 works of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets -- Shakespeare, Marlowe, and
 Donne -- and the nineteenth-century French poets -- Vildrac, Laforgue, and
 Rimbaud.

 His father, a candy manufacturer, attempted to dissuade him from a career
 in poetry, but Crane was determined to follow his passion to write. Living
 in New York City, he associated with many important figures in literature
 of the time, including Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter, E. E. Cummings,
 and Jean Toomer, but his heavy drinking and chronic instability frustrated
 any attempts at lasting friendship.

 An admirer of T. S. Eliot, Crane combined the influences of European
 literature and traditional versification with a particularly American
 sensibility derived from Walt Whitman. His major work, the book-length
 poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical
 and spiritual significance of America. Like Eliot, Crane used the landscape
 of the modern, industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic
 literature. Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932, at the age of thirty-
 three, by jumping from the deck of a steamship sailing back to New York
 from Mexico.

   -- [broken link] http://www.catryce.com/MysticCat/Poetry/Crane.html