SOURCE: "The Structure of Hart Crane's The Bridge '," in the University of Kansas City Review, Vol. 24, March, 1958, pp. 225-38.

[In the following essay, Slote defends The Bridge against critical charges of lacking structure, noting in particular Crane's own assertion that the poem is symphonic in structure rather than adhering to a traditional narrative form.}

Because contemporary literature has offered few enough long poems, it is unfortunate that Hart Crane's The Bridge¹ has been generally held unworthy as a whole, though poetically rich in texture. While many have believed in the poem, following the favorable tone of Malcolm Cowley's early review,² critical judgments have been cut more generally from the whole cloth of the Tate-Winters "archetypal" pattern.³ Crane's long poem is ironically and somewhat sadly viewed as a shape without form, a bridge with uncertain connections, as chaos come again and lost Atlantis doubly lost. But there are signs that this both puzzling and brilliant poem is being reconsidered,⁴and in that spirit I should like to offer a skeleton design for a unified Bridge, a design on Crane's own terms.

From one position, and with one type of critical glass, The Bridge does certainly seem to be a series of unrelated poems in which disillusion makes a shambles of a hope brighter than its logic. But approaching the poem from another position with the glass in a somewhat different focus, adjusted to Crane's conceptions, the elements fall into place. First, Crane thought of The Bridge as a complex symphonic structure with intricate repetitions of form within the whole, rather than an epic with the usual narrative logic.⁵ Although complicated, it is "one poem" with an "integrated unity and development"⁶in which "motives and situations recur" throughout.⁷ Secondly, as Crane said, he was writing in an affirmative rather than a negative tradition: "The poem, as a whole, is, I think, an affirmation of experience, and to that extent is "positive' rather than "negative' in the sense that The Waste Land is negative."⁸ He saw in the poetry of The Waste Land "complete renunciation," and preferred to identify himself with others of a "new vitality" and vision.⁹

And finally, in this affirmative tradition Crane used the point of view, the poetic theory, and the specific patterns of Walt Whitman, with whom he repeatedly and explicitly aligned himself, and whom he knew in part through Waldo Frank. In a letter to Munson, he said, "I begin to feel myself directly connected with "Whitman. I feel myself in currents that are positively awesome in their extent and possibilities."¹⁰ This identification is made clearer in The Bridge, in which he takes Whitman as guide: "My hand/in yours,/Walt Whitman—/so—" Here, of course, is the key. Since Crane so clearly took the Whitman position, he will be misunderstood as long as that position is misunderstood. If Whitman is seen asa bubbling exploiter of American chauvinism, The Bridge will seem like a hapless panegyric of American history and science, with many of the individual poems obviously unconnected. If, however, Whitman is seen as a deeply spiritual thinker, a mystic of cosmic consciousness (as he was to Waldo Frank and to Crane), the pattern in The Bridge has a chance to come into focus.¹¹ And it is critical here to note that whatever any one else may think of Whitman, Crane considered him a mystic of a particular oneness. The shape of The Bridge derives from that principle.

THE PATTERN OF THE BRIDGE

Crane's invocation to the bridge concludes: "And of the curveship lend a myth to God." Here, I believe, he has given the essential symbol and the essential form of the poem. In statement, structure, and idea, the curve or the arch—with its implied completed circle and its mystical direction—is the image which informs and illuminates The Bridge. Moreover, the sections of the poem are composed in united curves of space, time, and spiritual movement so that the whole is rounded into one. Although Crane uses the thematic curve repeatedly, it will be possible here to describe only the very general framework of the poem, with something of the origin and meaning of that structure. Others have noted the appearance of curves in The Bridge; I wish to go further in suggesting that the basic design of body and meaning depends upon that form.

The Bridge is divided into two parts, the first half including the "Proem," "Ave Maria," "Powhatan's Daughter," and "Cutty Sark." The second section begins with "Cape Hatteras" as theme, and continues through "Three Songs," "Quaker Hill," "The Tunnel," and "Atlantis." This division is Crane's own, for in asking his publisher to place a photograph ("of the barges and tug") between the "Cutty Sark" section and "Cape Hatteras," he wrote: "That is the "center' of the book, both physically and symbolically."¹² The first half explores the fused past and present of America and the meaning of self. It is the realization of identity, or position in time and space. The second half is the movement to spiritual vision, or the journey of the soul.

The structural curves of The Bridge are on three levels—space, time, and psychological action—and are accented by innumerable visual repetitions. In the first half, the space curve begins in mid-ocean ("Ave Maria"), moves to the bridge and city ("Harbor Dawn"), through subway and highway west ("Van Winkle"), across the land and down the river ("The River"), up the Appalachian river and to the far west ("The Dance"), back from the west and down the river again to the sea ("Indiana"), and returns in "Cutty Sark" to city, sea, and bridge. The time curve uses the present as a base, with a simultaneous historical movement from Columbus ("Ave Maria") to present consciousness ("Harbor Dawn"), exploration and settlement ("Van Winkle" and "The River"), the ancient Indian world ("The Dance"), and a return through pioneers ("Indiana") to the invocation of whaling ships at the close of "Cutty Sark." These passages also suggest the cyclic life movement from birth to maturity to old age, with life and land encircled by the farther reaches of being suggested by the sea.

In the second half, "Cape Hatteras" first ties the identity of the self-America to the dilemma of human failure after aspiration. Then begins a dramatization, in three inverted curves, of action which moves in a fall from illusion, through purgatorial punishment and evil, to the upward aspiring climb toward a mystic end. The first curve is a thematic statement in "Cape Hatteras" in which Whitman is chosen as the Vergil to lead the protagonist from death to soaring flight (and this is Whitman the mystic, not Whitman the so-called American optimist). The second curve is that of "Three Songs," in which the sexual or female principle is traced from death (or sterility) to life. And the final curve is the larger involvement of man dramatized through the failure of "Quaker Hill," the hell of "The Tunnel," and the final vision of "Atlantis." Around these sections is a space arc, from the sea of "Southern Cross," through the city's depths and heights, and back to bridge and sea at the close.

This general pattern of The Bridge can be verified by letting the imaginationmove rapidly through the course of the action. How those arcs of movement derive from the original image of Brooklyn Bridge, and how they function symbolically, will be considered further.

THE IMAGED CURVE: ORIGIN AND USE

Brooklyn Bridge, the initial image, is a suspension bridge, its main line tracing across and through two stolid piers in a shallow curve to the land on either side. From the tops of the piers fall cables in three inverted arches, one half-moon in the center and two slighter curves at the ends. In the piers are openings arched like Gothic windows. It is this symmetry of substance and grace, beaded with lights by night, gull-circled by day, holding at once both stillness and movement, that aroused Crane's most mystical imagination.

One of the best descriptions of its quality he found in a painting and an essay by Joseph Stella, to whom Crane wrote of the coincidence that "you . . . have had the same sentiments regarding Brooklyn Bridge which inspired the main theme and pattern of my poem."¹³ Stella's essay describes the bridge as

a weird metallic Apparition under a metallic sky, out of proportion with the winged lightness of its arch, traced for the conjunction of WORLDS, supported by the massive dark towers dominating the surrounding tumult of the surging skyscrapers with their gothic majesty sealed in the purity of their arches, the cables, like divine messages from above, transmitted to the vibrating coils, cutting and dividing into innumerable musical spaces the nude immensity of the sky; it impressed me as the shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of AMERICA—the eloquent meeting point of all the forces arising in a superb assertion of their powers, in APOTHEOSIS . . .¹⁴

In Stella's painting¹⁵ two of the arched openings of a pier are at the forefront of a vista of cables in sweeping curves, and are crossed by circles of light and brighter arcs against the distant perpendicular lines of the steel city. It is important to note that Stella's response to the bridge emphasized not the steel power of the scientific bridge, but the mystical movement and music of its lines, its curveship.

In Crane's poem, the visual curveship of the bridge as theme is stated in the last line of the poem, "To Brooklyn Bridge." The culmination of the visual images is in the last section, "Atlantis," where the shape sustains "the arching path Upwards" which blends into "One arc synoptic of all tides below . . ." Here are the "arching strands of song" and its "lariat sweep" which imply the rainbow's arch of promise as "Deity's glittering Pledge."

But the immediate visual curves of the bridge are only thematic beginnings, even as the gods who take on mortal forms must then use the mythic word and act. The arch of the mind and emotions of the man who follows the curve of the bridge is the kinetic image that is also important to the effect of the poem. "All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it," wrote Walt Whitman in "A Song for Occupations."¹⁶ The lines continue,

(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone?
or the lines of the arches and cornices?)

All music is what awakes from you when you are
reminded by the instruments . . . (I,263)

Whitman turned the arena of the poem from the page to the person, the variable poetic movements tracing their own designs in the consciousness.

Crane, too, in a letter to Harriet Monroe, said that he considered the effect of images in series the only essential logic in his poetry and the source of its meaning.¹⁷ That he deliberately tried to make the motion of the curve organic in The Bridge is indicated in a letter to Waldo Frank:

I have attempted to induce the same feelings of elation, etc.—like beingcarried forward and upward simultaneously—both in imagery, rhythm and repetition, that one experiences in walking across my beloved Brooklyn Bridge.¹⁸

"Motion forward and upward" is reinforced by the use of words like "sweep," "flight of strings," "spiring cordage," "ascends," "leap and converge." From the seagull's flight "with inviolate curve" to the last ring of rainbows, the curveship of The Bridge projects into parabolas of imaginative movement in time and space that fit the action and the idea of the poem into a single comprehensible pattern. The meaning of that curved pattern can be traced first in Whitman.

BACKGROUNDS IN WHITMAN

Crane's indebtedness to Whitman for theme and image in The Bridge can be observed in the rather obvious parallels in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Passage to India," and "Song of the Universal"; in Crane's explicit alignment with Whitman in "Cape Hatteras"; and in the similarity of their ideas. Although it is not my intention to explore completely the relationships in the poetry of Crane and Whitman, it is necessary to show something of their likeness. Both were mystics, and Crane felt drawn into the currents of the larger tradition to which both belonged—the affirmation of a spiritualized cosmic union.

That others thought of Whitman as a blatant exploiter of the glories of America and the mass disturbed Crane, as he wrote despairingly to Tate:

as you, like so many others, never seem to have read his Democratic Vistas and other statements sharply decrying the materialism, industrialism, etc., of which you name him the guilty and hysterical spokesman, there isn't much use in my tabulating the qualified, yet persistent reasons I have for my admiration of him, and my allegiance to the positive and universal tendencies implicit in nearly all his best work.¹⁹

These "positive and universal tendencies" form a conception of a mystic totality in which opposites are paradoxically identified: body and spirit, past and present, good and evil. The parabolas of mystic evolution, the encirclement of all experience as necessary to the generation of a spiritual force, the movement of consciousness which in its very kinetic poise also unites man and the cosmos—these central conceptions in Whitman's poetry help to explain the essential form of Crane's bridge.

The union, totality, and inclusion suggested by the curve or the circle are also Whitman's, whose "vast similitude" spans and encloses life and death and time. (II,22) Equating the spiritual and physical (I,105), Whitman saw the body as identity and selfhood, and the threshold for a complete consummation in the mystic vision. The wholeness of the cosmos is the true good; therefore, the "devilish and the dark" are also a part of "earth's orbic scheme," the "Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete." (III,23) In the mystic evolution, Whitman wrote in "Song of the Universal," not only the right is justified, but "what we call evil" is "also justified." From "the huge festering trunk, from craft and guile and tears," health and joy emerge. In the affirmative acceptance of experience, all things have their place. (I,277)

Whitman's "mystic evolution" is the upward, spiral lift of generation and fulfillment towards immortality, or spiritual essence, the Cathay or Atlantis which Crane uses as symbolic end. And when Crane says of Whitman,

something green,
Beyond all sesames of science was thy choice
Wherewith to bind us throbbing with one
voice,

he could have been reading directly from Whitman's "Song of the Universal":

Yet again, lo! the soul, above all science,
For it has history gather'd like husks around
the globe.

and "In spiral routes by long detours," the real to the ideal tends. (I,276-277) There are ever the "Eidolons,"

growth, the rounding of the circle,
Ever the summit and the merge at last...

(I,6)

The scheme of the cosmos and man's green force within it is marked by movement—the span of consciousness on Whitman's open road, passage to India and more than India: "Are they wings plumed indeed for such far flights?" (II,196) Crane's flight of the gull, the eagle, and "Easters of speeding light" repeat the upward and outward aspiring of the arch.

The paradox of balance and movement at one in the span of Crane's bridge suggests Whitman's idea of the poet whose immediate eye becomes the ever-present moving consciousness which unites past and present with one look and sees in diversity a spiritual whole. Whitman speaks of the "full-grown poet" standing between the round globe of Nature and the Soul of man, holding each by the hand, blending and reconciling the two. (III,18) And in "Passage to India" the poet is seen as an instrument of divine union:

This end—the union of separations and discordances—is part of the "more than India" to which Whitman's poetry set sail.

Crane saw in his own function as poet the same joining of diversity in the creation of a whole. "What I am really handling," he wrote to Otto Kahn, "is the Myth of America. Thousands of strands have had to be searched for, sorted and interwoven."²⁰ What implications, then, do Whitman's ideas of spiritual totality and force have for an understanding of Crane's "Myth of America," a myth which also belongs to the older poet? The relationship is clearly intended, as Crane writes in "Cape Hatteras":

Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel;
And it was thou who on the boldest heel
Stood up and flung the span on even wing
Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof
I sing!

Both the life in the object (the breath in steel) and the shape of the idea make the span possible, This body-spirit of the myth of America Whitman emphatically articulated. It was most clearly not a celebration of the present glories, power, and scientific achievements of America, either in Whitman's day or very soon to come. As Crane observed, in Democratic Vistas Whitman agonized over the failures, the weakness, the slow maturing of America:

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. (V,61)

He found the apparently successful New World democracy "an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results." (V,63) Crane was often disillusioned, as his letters show, but Whitman more than matched him in despair:

We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and under-currents, vortices—all so dark, untried—and whither shall we turn? (V,144)

However, the dark moods are matched with more knowledgeable insights:

Thought you greatness was to ripen for you like a pear? If you would have greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages, centuries—must pay for it with a proportionate price. (V,145)

These are the hard views of America that Crane found in Democratic Vistas. If Whitman could feel in "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood" an "ominous greatnessevil as well as good," (II,239) his own mythic bridge must be of something other than chauvinistic steel.

For Whitman, the "Myth of America" was the possible spiritual fulfillment of its people (who are its individuals), a fulfillment hoped for, believed in, but not yet accomplished. It was the whole structure and act of a human society moving toward brotherhood and complete selfhood. The story of America's past could be only the statement of its birth-pangs and its peculiar identity, but there was also the certainty that if ever a people might reach a state of spiritual force, it might well be America where there already existed a symbolic union and a kind of Adamic "new earth" whose strength might nourish the seed of perfection. Thus a celebration of America's present could be in truth the celebration of the life force and its potency.

It is clear in all of Whitman's writing that he believed the greatness possible for America must include spiritual unity and aspiration. Both individualism and brotherhood are to be

vitalized by religion . . . breathing into the proud, material tissues, the breath of life. For I say at the core of democracy, finally, is the religious element . . . Nor may the scheme step forth, clothed in resplendent beauty and command, till these, bearing the best, the latest fruit, the spiritual, shall fully appear. (V,80)

If there is no spiritualization, "we are on the road to a destiny . . . of the fabled damned." (V,147) In the "Notes" to his Preface, 1876, Whitman spoke of "the ultimate Democratic purports" as "the ethereal and spiritual ones." (V,194) In the poems of "death, immortality, and a free entrance into the spiritual world" he wished "to set the keystone to my democracy's enduring arch." (V,195) The central poem in this group is "Passage to India," almost a prototype for The Bridge.

Crane wrote in his essay, "Modern Poetry," that Whitman

better than any other, was able to coordinate those forces in America which seem most intractable, fusing them into a universal vision which takes on additional significance as time goes on.²¹

In relation to Whitman's "universal vision," America is not great in herself, but she may become great through the fulfillment of the scheme, and the search of the soul through time and space is the most significant part of the myth of America. As Whitman wrote in "Song of the Universal,"

And thou America,
For the scheme's culmination, its thought
and its reality,
For these (not for thyself) thou hast arrived.

(I,278)

America is second; the "mystic ensemble," the "plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space" (I,278) is first. The end (India? Cathay?) is the spiritual end, and it will give the glory to America if the ship of the soul can sail far enough into the mystery of that ethered sea.

To conceive of the Whitman-Crane myth of America as even partially a glorification of science or the machine age is to miss the point again. If science is praised, it is as a means, not as a final glory, just as all that is physical is good because it is a way of becoming. In "Modern Poetry" Crane is clearly saying that science is to be used, not defined—to be blended, not isolated. This is only the most practical of poetic views, when a twentieth century poet wishes to speak with some contemporaneity. He must of course use the mechanical manifestations of his own time. But when he also wishes to speak in the eternal, spiritual present, he turns more especially to that "something green," beyond all sesames of science. The "rebound seed" wielded by Whitmaninvolves generation and the cyclic meaning of life: the circle which spans, encompasses, and identifies birth and death, space and time, past and present, flesh and spirit, good and evil. Because it is the core of Whitman's meaning, the principle of such a cosmic union cannot be ignored in determining the symbolic bridge of Crane, whose allegiance was to "the positive and universal tendencies" in Whitman's work.

THE SYMBOLIC CURVE

What, then, is involved in the curveship of Crane's bridge, the shape which can "lend a myth to God"? A form that includes, unites, and completes is performing a spiritual act; or, to paraphrase Crane's line further, spiritual action is the myth of God and it can be represented physically in the symbolic curve and circle. Crane's bridge, both visual object and course of action, means whatever its lines trace upon the consciousness. These traceries are, first, the sense of wholeness; and, second, the sense of lift and resolution, or its reverse in fall and recovery.

The curves and circles of Crane's bridge perform the ancient ritual of eternity: what is whole, total, and perfect is circumscribed with unending motion; what is divided is made one. The bridge is called "one arc synoptic of all tides below." Elements that are unlike or separate can in this one structure be tied together and made one identity: the two shores of Here and There, of Now and Then—Space in the enclosure of the arc, and Time in the going across. The piers of the bridge are heavy and rooted in earth, but its upward curves are of the air. In some of his first versions of "Atlantis," Crane described the bridge

Whose alignment rears from equal out to
equal,
Yielding mutual assumption on its arches
Fused and veering to the measure of our
arms ...²²

The form has feet on the ground and head in the air, even as Crane in those early versions represented the poetspeaker as standing on the bridge with arms

That open to project a salient disk
That winds the moon and midnight in one
face.²³

These first drafts of the poem are significant only in that they show by more direct image and statement something of Crane's later, and more subtle, mystic synthesis.

Both wholeness and resolution are represented in the peak of balance at the center of the arch, where the double thrust of two halves are fused into one. This is the highest moment of the curve, and the point of vision. Such a fusion blends into the symbolism of sexual union and fulfillment of the life force, much as D. H. Lawrence used the image of the male and female joined to make a spiritual whole. For example, the arch to Will Brangwen in The Rainbow "leapt up from the plain of earth," until with it he

leaped clear into the darkness above, to the fecundity and the unique mystery, to the touch, the clasp, the consummation, the climax of eternity, the apex of the arch.²⁴

At the same "climax of eternity" Whitman had placed his keystone of democracy's arch—the poems of spiritual vision—and here the "Eidolon" circle found its "summit and the merge at last. . ." (I,6) Such a "merge" or union of duality holds the paradox of "kinetic poise" in the structure of the bridge (both object and poem), where motion is caught in the moment of fulfillment. The creative force toward completion is also a part of spiritual experience.

Another important element in the curveship of the bridge is the kind of wholeness in which man meets the elemental world and rounds act and being to nature'screative force and mysterious darkness. Waldo Frank, Crane's friend and critic, gave in a 1925 essay called "Straight Streets"²⁵ an analysis which could well be related to Crane's conception of the curve. "The curve is the way of acceptance: the angle is the way of resistance," said Frank. Nature is "the sinuous, rounded being," exterior and interior:

Man's mind moves in curves. His thoughts arch, vault, melt into reverie. Dream and sense swerve into each other. His heart, too, is full of arcuations. And the heart's desires are parabolas.

Frank saw in the highest Indian culture a kind of sophisticated primitivism which has learned to follow the curve of nature:

The Indian culture began when his innate spiritual and intellectual values formed a solution with the world about him: his culture was achieved when the responses between his soul and the world had rounded into a unified life which expressed both fully.

The curve is here the tracery of a kind of ultimate cultural health, suggesting man's acceptance of his place in the wholeness of life. As Whitman saw in all living things "in them and myself the same old law," (I,48) and all things a part of the scheme, the ensemble, so man joins with the curve of acceptance. The "identification of yourself with all of life" was to Crane happiness, related to "the true idea of God."²⁶

The concept of the whole, of unified duality, is dramatized in another way by the act of the curve whose lines go in continuous upward and downward movements—or which fall from high, and out of descent create another rising force. These are patterns of the journey of the soul in its struggle with the unwieldy, unequal, and fragmentary forms of mortal experience that must be reconciled before the final vision is attained. Both the lines of Crane's physical bridge and the movement of imaginative action in the poetic bridge turn to the same thematic key: that the whole form can exist only because it has joined division, diversity, and motion; and that such an identity has a living dimension which can touch an infinite spiritual power.

CURVESHIP IN THE BRIDGE

Two elements of meaning and form in the curveship of The Bridge can be considered representative of the body of the poem: the union of duality, and spiritual realization through that duality. For whatever chaos Crane may personally represent, his poetic vision did seize upon this kind of wholeness, and he dramatized it in the curved union, the encircling lines of The Bridge.

To achieve an identity, man or America is shown in the first half of The Bridge to be contained in time and space, aware of what is incomplete and mortal and envisioning the eternal. Thematic imagery in the "Proem" introduces the "inviolate curve" of the gull's flight, repeated later in the "unfractioned idiom" of the bridge. At the close of the "Proem," the descending sweep of the vaulting curve is invoked to link the man standing by the shadowy pier to the initial skyward flight. Here two elements of the bridge—its root in earth and its lift to air—are joined in the imagery of the poem. By shadow, the darkened city, and the snow that "submerges an iron year," the "Proem" further implies the duality of darkness and light, of death and generation, that the curveship of the bridge can include and unify.

In the mid-ocean of "Ave Maria," looking both forward and back to the hoped-for Cathay and the discovered continent, the ship of Columbus links past and present and moves into the "steep savannahs" of the double Word: "Eden and the enchained Sepulchre." These oppositions of life and death, or the corollary of time-eternity and body-spirit, are repeated throughout the poem. What Crane called the "sea swell crescendo" of "Ave Maria" culminates in a vision beyond the waves' green towers in night and chaos, but this spiritual vision comes down to rest in naked kingdoms of the trembling heart, the movement here paralleling theturn at the close of the "Proem," in which the down-sweeping curve of the bridge is to touch the man who waits in its shadow.

The central figure of "Powhatan's Daughter" is Pocahontas, the natural body of America and a symbol of fertility and the life-force. In this section is performed the ritual of union with nature and the sexual-physical as a progress toward spiritual identity. This principle is the same as Whitman's identification of body and soul and Waldo Frank's curve of acceptance. This element of earth and the flesh is the physical half of duality, and its complete acceptance is necessary for any final mystic vision. When the drama of "Powhatan's Daughter" explores the body of America, the land symbolizes the physical and creative body of man as much as Pocahontas symbolizes the soil of natural America. In history, the complete realization of the body of America is through its exploration in space and time, and this narrative line is traced in the five sections of "Powhatan's Daughter," but with a fusion of present and past so that all of it happens in a simultaneous grasp of consciousness. Crane wanted to show "the continuous and living evidence of the past in the inmost vital substance of the present."²⁷

Throughout the drama of movement over America, described in "Powhatan's Daughter," there is a consciousness of the natural world, "a body under the wide rain," but its meaning is evanescent, and the "iron dealt cleavage" of an age that has nearly obliterated the natural union of physical and spiritual needs to be joined. As the time-river blends into sea and prefigures the eternal Atlantis, so in the Indian world of "The Dance" Maquokeeta is phoenix-like brought out of time, and the nature-figure of Pocahontas fulfills the cyclic body-life. Here Crane also uses the serpent-time and eagle-space duality. The separation of white and Indian culture is a corollary of the cleavage which has denied the natural and primitive reality and thus a spiritual wholeness. But in a possible union of nature and man, best demonstrated in the cyclic, generative, fertility principle, time and eternity may also be reconciled, as well as time and space: "The serpent with the eagle in the boughs." Thus the white mother of "Indiana" takes on the nature symbolism of Pocahontas, and the son continues to sea in man's perpetual search.

In "Cutty Sark" the fugue of time (the derelict sailor) and eternity (Atlantis out of the pianola song) prepares the protagonist for a union of the real and present walk across the bridge and the phantasy of whalers and clipper ships, whose quest joins the dreams of India, Cathay, and Melville's elusive whale. But identity and selfhood are made of these very contradictions: the real and the visionary, time and mortality bound in the visible land surrounded by eternal seas where may lie the mystic rose of Atlantis.

The drama of spiritual vision, the journey of the soul, is demonstrated in the second half of The Bridge as a downward and upward curve: the fall from the attempted ideal, and the re-trial through chaos and the stark ugliness which is part of the human commitment to the flesh and mortality. But it is through this very death that the upward lift to mystical fulfillment is achieved, as light is known by darkness. This configuration can be seen most completely in the details of "Cape Hatteras," the ode to Whitman which Crane said was a two years' effort at a synthesis of his theme.²⁸

The first scene of "Cape Hatteras" ("Imponderable the dinosaur/sinks slow") suggests the turning of the earth (the sinking eastern Cape, the rising western range) and the simultaneous recession of the primitive creature into the past. At the center of this natural machine is the dynamo of flux and creative energy, and (known, too, by Whitman) the natural body of America in Pocahontas, which still lives under the surface structures. Whatever has been discovered in space and time is reduced finally to the contained view of the past-reversed self; but the circle of infinity, the crucible of endless or unconquered space, has eternal motion for the "free ways still ahead!" Here Whitman is taken for the Vergil to conduct the soul upon the search for infinity, spiritual knowledge to be gained through eyes that know the full acceptance of the great cyclic mystery—"Sea eyes and tidal, undenying, bright with Myth!"

Turning again to the pattern of the search, Crane introduces the dynamo of earth's creative force as the "nasal whine of power" in the air-conquering machine. Through a violent re-creation of the physical force of the airplane, the reader is careened upward to splinter the yet "unvanquished space." Lines move up, like hurtling javelins, above the lightning, yet the ascensions are aimed farther still: in the wrist (the blood-pulse) of the symbolic flyer is yet the charge "To conjugate infinity's dim marge—" In the images of the poem, the man-machine is forced downward before it reaches the heights of infinity, and with the "skull's deep, sure reprieve" all movement twists in spirals downward in the falling curve, crashing the brave attempt into debris.

This tracing of a curve across symbolic skies has very little significance as a eulogy of air-power. Rather, it is the image of the human situation diagrammed in the language of the modern world. It is the way a poet of the machine age would tell the story of Icarus. The climb toward infinity is also a kind of voyage, with air taking the place of sea, and airplane of ship, but the old trial toward "something beyond" and the mortal failure—perhaps in death—are again dramatized. The last part of "Cape Hatteras" shows the way in which the ascending curve can rise out of the "beached heap of high bravery" by Hatteras. From Whitman and his prophetic voice, ascensions hover, and with belief in the "rebound seed," with "pure impulse inbred? To answer deepest soundings/ O, upward from the dead/ Thou bringest tally . . ."

Whitman's song has known both heights and depths of experience, the whole arc. He has kept the meaning of death, and has given to the speaker the meaning of the seasonal cycle of life, in which gold autumn (or death) "crowned the trembling hill." Whitman is clearly used as a messianic, prophetic figure whose spiritual force and understanding could create the true bridge to infinity, "set breath in steel" and fling the span of the mythic bridge, or set the pattern for the ascending, encircling movement toward a spiritual fulfillment. Because Whitman has passed the barrier of death (both actually and in the poetic vision), he can lead out of the debris of mortal failure to the farthest space of consciousness. Movement ascends

launched in abysmal cupolas of space,
Toward endless terminals, Easters of speeding light—

The final "curveship" is the rainbow's arch that

shimmeringly stands
Above the Cape's ghoul-mound .. .

So the poet-speaker takes the hand of Whitman, the Vergil who can lead the soul on its necessary road.

"Cape Hatteras" presents a pattern which is to be retraced in other symbols in the remaining section of the poem. Here it is shown in the physical terms of air-flight and destruction. But it is out of the total experience of both high and low that the final ascending "passage" is possible. This is the journey of the soul to the mystic end, as it goes through the flesh, the evil, and the death which are the necessary parts of mortality. To think of the structure of "Cape Hatteras" as showing, first, the human condition; second, the human failure; and third, the rise to infinity through the way set down by Whitman, will give it a consistent form. As a miscellaneous praise of geology, or of science, or of Whitman, it will be a fumbling, sentimental effort. But Crane's two years of work on it as a synthesis are justified when it is seen as the diagram, the visualization, of a kind of modern Commedia.

The falling-rising curve of "Three Songs" enacts the life-giving, spiritualizing force of the sexual principle, uniting the dualities of male and female, fertility and sterility, lust and idealized love. Recognizing defeat through Eve, who brought death into the world, life is reborn by the acceptance of the flesh and generation, begun at its lowest form in Magdalen and rising to the idealized reality of Mary. The visual curve drops from the heights of the Southern Cross, to the dark waters, and up through dance hall and streets to the nickel-dime tower. In a similar curve, "Atlantis" is attained by way of the fallen ideal of "Quaker Hill" and the darkness of "The Tunnel." The visual descent is in the autumn leaves of "Quaker Hill" which leads farther into the depths of the subway and up to the bridge, at last a symphony whose leap is the circle of "the lark's return," which holds "in single chrysalis the many twain," and from whose curveship springs a mystical rainbow-prophecy.

The last four lines of "Atlantis" epitomize the three directives in Crane with which this paper began: the symphonic form, a positive spiritual belief, and this affirmation in the design of Whitman's cosmic unity:

—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.

The bridge is one being of music and fire. Themes of the serpent and the eagle, time and space, are bound by rings of rainbows while "pity steeps the grass," recalling Whitman's microcosm of the Leaves infused by love. But to the question, "Is it Cathay .. . ?" the answers are dual, antiphonal. The point of stillness out of movement is not yet gained, for whispers swing somewhere in the blue. Yet "swing" suggests the balanced poise of the present, whose moment of Here and Now is what we know of the bridge of consciousness.

In fact, both sections of The Bridge end in questions. "Is it Cathay?" is matched at the end of the first half (at the close of "Cutty Sark") with the elusive quest of the whaling ships, and of "You rivals two—/Taeping?/ Ariel?" Both Leviathan and Atlantis are legendary objects of search, strangely shrouded in the mysteries of the sea, and their ambiguity adds to the unanswered questions. But neither did Whitman arrive at India in his voyage. "Passage to India" ends with the "daring joy" of sailing farther and farther on the seas of God. This swing between mythic object and immediate action reinforces the ambivalence which enters into much of the symbolic bridge, as the present moment joins past and future and identity fuses the separations. Here is the center of the "oneness" or acceptance which Crane celebrates, and which the curveship of the bridge dramatizes.

THE LOGIC OF METAPHOR

The structural unity of Crane's The Bridge is more logically fulfilled in the poem than most criticism has been willing to allow. But the glass must, of course, be turned to more than the function of the visual object. As an identity of idea, movement, and form, the "bridge" operates in a kind of psychological logic, or what Crane called the "logic of metaphor."²⁹ Curves and arches are traced in a multitude of visual ways, but the reader must also feel himself lifted, poised, or ascending physically and emotionally; and he must see both action and concept rounded to each other. Because Crane assumed that the imagination of the reader would follow the "emotional dynamics" of the metaphor, the shape of the bridge has its own logic in the context of the poem, and comes alive in the sensibility of the reader. One of Whitman's statements on poetry will have a particular significance here:

Poetic style, when address'd to the soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista, music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints. True it may be architecture; but again it may be the forest wildwood, or the best effect thereof, at twilight, the waving oaks and cedars in the wind, and the impalpable odor. (V,202-203)

The architecture of The Bridge is the curve of union. But in the farther vistas opened by that curve blend circles upon circles, parabolas like petals that compose at last the impalpable flower of eternity.

¹The Collected Poems of Hart Crane, ed. with Introd. by Waldo Frank (NewYork, 1946).

² "A Preface to Hart Crane," New Republic, LVII (23 April 1930), 276-277.

³ Allen Tate, "A Distinguished Poet," The Hound and Horn, III (July-Sept. 1930), 580-585, and Yvor Winters, "The Progress of Hart Crane," Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, XXXVI (June 1930), 153-165.

⁴ Two significant articles are Stanley K. Coffman, Jr., "Symbolism in The Bridge," PMLA, LXVI (March 1951), 65-77, and John R. Willingham, "Three Songs' of Hart Crane's The Bridge: A Reconsideration," American Literature, XXVII (March 1955), 62-68.

⁵ Letter to Gorham Munson (18 Feb. 1923), in The Letters of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (New York, 1952), p. 125. All references to Crane's letters are to pages in this edition.

⁶ Letter to Herbert Weinstock (22 April 1930), p. 350.

⁷ Letter to Waldo Frank (23 Aug. 1926), p. 275.

⁸ Letter to Selden Rodman (22 May 1930), p. 351.

⁹ Letter to Waldo Frank (27 Feb. 1923), p. 127.

¹⁰ (2 March 1923), p. 128.

¹¹ For a view of mysticism in Whitman, see James E. Miller, Jr., ""Song of Myself As Inverted Mystical Experience," PMLA, LXX (Sept. 1955), 636-661.

¹² Letter to Caresse Crosby (26 Dec. 1929), p. 347.

¹³ (24 Jan. 1929), p. 334.

¹⁴ Joseph Stella, "The Brooklyn Bridge," transition, 16-17 (June 1929), 87-88; reprinted from a monograph, New York, privately issued by Joseph Stella.

¹⁵Ibid., facing p. 88.

¹⁶The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman, ed. R. M. Bucke et al., 10 vols. (New York, 1902), I, 263. All references to Whitman are to this edition and will be indicated in the text with volume and page.

¹⁷ "A Discussion with Hart Crane," Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, XXIX (Oct. 1926), 34-41.

¹⁸ (18 Jan. 1926), p. 232.

¹⁹ (13 July 1930), p. 354.

²⁰ (12 Sept. 1927), p. 305.

All these separations and gaps shall be taken up
and hook'd and linked together,
Nature and Man shall be disjoin'd and diffused no
more,
The true son of God shall absolutely fuse them.
(11,191)

²¹The Collected Poems of Hart Crane, p. 179.

²² Lines sent to Alfred Stieglitz (4 July 1923), in Brom Weber, Hart Crane (New York, 1948), p. 426.

²³Ibid.

²⁴ D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (London, 1955), p. 199.

²⁵In the American Jungle (New York, 1937), pp. 123-127.

²⁶ Letter to Charlotte Rychtarik (21 July 1923), p. 140.

²⁷ Letter to Otto H. Kahn (12 Sept. 1927), p. 305.

²⁸ Letter to Caresse Crosby (17 Sept. 1929), p. 346.

²⁹ General Aims and Theories," in Philip Horton, Hart Crane (New York, 1937), p. 327 (App. I). See also Crane's letter to Harriet Monroe in Poetry, XXIX, 35-36.