[In the following essay, Sharp considers The Bridge as a piece of modern music]

In a letter to Gorham Munson, Hart Crane wrote:

Modern music almost drives me crazy! I went to hear D'Indy's II Symphony last night and my hair stood on end at its revelations. To get those, and others of men like Strauss, Ravel, Scriabin, and Bloch into words, one needs to ransack the vocabularies of Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster (for theirs were the richest) and add on scientific, street and counter, and psychological terms, etc. Yet I claim such things can be done!¹¹

The reference to Vincent d'Indy and "Modern music" is helpful as a starting point to the understanding of Crane's long poem The Bridge (1930). D'Indy was the influential director of Paris's Schola Cantorum, founded in 1894, whose "musico-mystical-aesthetic-regime" trained musicians in Gregorian chant and counterpoint.² He was also the composer of the Istar Variations (1897), in which he modified the variation, as a restatement of a musical theme, by transferring the theme from its usual place at the beginning of a composition to the end. This innovation paved the way for composers like Reger and Richard Strauss to write free variations in which the structural outlines of a theme were almost unrecognizable.

The Istar Variations, which begins with a complex variation and ends with a simple theme in octaves, is similar in structure to The Bridge in that the latter is developed through various stages of complexity which culminate in the harmonious statement of "Atlantis," the eighth variation of the poem. That the structure of The Bridge is a free variation on a theme is evidenced by the apparent disharmony of its development. There is no tight structure or forward movement as there is in Eliot's The Waste Land (1922); rather, the poem develops a-chronologically through verbal plainsong and cadence, cacophony and discord. Unlike the atonality of Schoenberg, which attuned to the dissonance of things, Crane argued for the possibility of the ideal by scoring a song of joy. Like his mentors, Blake and Whitman, however, he realized that harmony was not merely a reconciliation of opposites; this much he had learned from Plato's Symposium:

. . . harmony is composed of differing notes of higher or lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by the art of music; for if the higher and lower notes still disagreed, there could be no harmony,—clearly not. For harmony is a symphony, and symphony is an agreement; but an agreement of disagreements while they disagree there cannot be; you cannot harmonize that which disagrees.

Music was a great love of Hart Crane. In 1920, Ernest Bloch became the Director of the Cleveland Institute of Music; he also conducted the institute's orchestra. After seeing Bloch conduct his Trois Poèmes Juifs, Crane wrote that it was "magnificent enough for Solomon to have marched & sung to," and of the maestro he said: "I occasionally pass him on the streets or in the aisles of the auditorium, and realize that genius, after all, may walk in Cleveland" (Letters, p. 82).

Crane was part of a group which met periodically at the Cleveland Institute of Music. There, he became friends with Jean Binet, a professor of Eurhythmics, who was "a remarkable and inspired amateur pianist, playing Erik Satie, Ravel, etc., to perfection" (Letters, p. 66). While in Cleveland, Crane attended a concert every other week, and when he moved away from Ohio, his musical interests aggrandized. In his letters are mentioned Chopin ballades, Scriabin preludes, Debussy's Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum, Isadora Duncan dancing to Tschaikovsky's Pathetique, a new Victrola on which he listened to Wagner's The Meistersingers overture. He also knew the modern music of Bartok, Varèse, Bax, Casella, Szymanowski, and Schoenberg. The latter, he wrote, "is my preference among them all as being the only one who approached the magnificence of  loch's work as I still remember it from Cleveland performances" (Letters, p. 177). At a party in New York, he met Aaron Copland, who in 1944 composed the ballet Appalachian Spring, whose title is from "The Dance." He met Edgar Varèse in Paris, and while in California he took a liking to Brahms and Beethoven (Letters, p. 316). In 1925, he saw Stravinsky conduct but was disappointed because the Sacre du Printemps was not included on the program. "I don't care," he wrote, "for what I heard of his latest work. Indeed, the Petrouchka was the only fine thing on his program" (Letters, p. 200).

Crane's taste was not only for classical music; he also liked popular jazz and ethnic music. While in Mexico, the native canciones and the local singers intrigued him. One song, Las Mañanitas, he liked particularly, going so far as to say that it "might have been composed by Bach" (Letters, p. 408). While he was writing The Bridge, he would turn up the volume on his phonograph and compose to the "Brazen hypnotics"¹ of jazz, or Wagner, or Scriabin. In the light of his musical interests, it is appropriate that The Bridge was to be "a symphony with an epic theme" (Letters, p. 309).

There is in The Bridge a harmonizing scheme which is complemented by the aims of the American composers Charles Ives and Aaron Copland. Ives's intention was to "make anew the toughness, power, copiousness, triviality and grandeur of the American scene and the American spirit."⁴ While he did not believe that the real and the ideal could be reconciled in temporality, he insisted that it was the duty of all to attempt such a reconciliation. In order to create a new New World, man must reforge his own individual spirit to reforge society. Copland, on the other hand, sought to reintegrate in his music the broken fragments of the present. His compositions grew out of the mechanical world of the twentieth century, the heir of Ives's traditional America. Consequently, Copland's music is of the city, Ives's of the garden. In The Bridge, Hart Crane set out to unify these two disparate elements in a verbal score in which the Brooklyn Bridge, like Schoenberg's twelve-tone row, became a means to faith—the Word from which society might derive sustenance and life.

As suggested, The Bridge is a free variation on a theme of the Brooklyn Bridge. It is free in the sense that it does not conform to a strict horizontal time sequence. When Crane chose to present a historical analogy, he used the new cinematic technique of flashback. This did not, however, affect the form which is as rigid as a musical score.

The impetus for the form came from the Brooklyn Bridge itself. From the window of his apartment at 110 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, Crane could see the Manhattan skyline. The roof, which was accessible to him, afforded a panoramic view of John Roebling's masterpiece. Roebling, whom Crane called "a true Spenglerian hero" in a letter to Allen Tate, had been a student and friend of the philosopher Georg Hegel (Letters, p. 293). As a result of this friendship, the Brooklyn Bridge is "a thoroughgoing architectural statement of the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis."⁵ This synthesis of antithetical elements, of stone and steel, allowed Crane to compose a poem which conformed to the "One arc synoptic" ("Atlantis") of the Brooklyn Bridge.

That Crane saw the synthesis of his bridge as "synoptic" is no accident, lendingas it does a further dimension to the poem. Just as the first three books of the New Testament are closely related, each presenting a similar account of the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ, so Crane's poem presents a very definite scheme which is both religious and philosophic. Contained within the symbolic design of Hegelian philosophy and religious belief is the American past, present, and projected future. Using the past as his thesis, the antithesis of the present becomes a synthesis in which the future is projected as a harmony of the past and the present. The "triple-noted clause" of "Quaker Hill" becomes, for example, a single word, a single song, and a single myth, connected grammatically by a "multitudinous Verb" ("Atlantis") which ultimately links the past and the present to a polyphony which sounds the future. The Brooklyn Bridge is the "harp and altar, of the fury fused" ("To Brooklyn Bridge") whereby this syntactical harmony is achieved.

There are in The Bridge nearly two hundred direct or indirect references to sound and music; over ten musical instruments are mentioned specifically by name. The poem, preceded by an introductory proem or prelude, is written in eight sections. Until Chopin changed the nature of the prelude, its purpose was to introduce the theme of a liturgical ceremony or other composition, usually a fugue or a suite. The remaining eight sections of the poem may be seen equally as a verbal octet which develops the theme or, more appropriately, a motet for eight voices. The latter was the most important form of early polyphonic music in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Whereas, originally it was an unaccompanied choral composition based on a Latin sacred text, it was adapted over the centuries to accommodate the secular and, in the case of French motets, the licentious. The analogy between The Bridge and the Latin motet is not too gratuitous because the latter was a perfect expression of the sacred and the secular which voiced, for example, the universalism of Thomas Aquinas. This sacro-secularism became, in essence, the stuff of Hart Crane's Americanism.

In writing an eight-part motet, which is also a free variation on a theme, Crane broke all musical rules. In this, his experiments are closer to those of John Cage than Josquin des Pres. While musical influence is pervasive in The Bridge, Crane's use of it was not confined to the hymns of "choristers" ("Cape Hatteras") or the cadenzas of "a somewhere violin" ("National Winter Garden"). His musical ear was also able to tune natural and mechanical sound into words. By incorporating these various sounds, he was able to compose a pastiche whereby each period in the poem could be easily identified by its own particular music. For example, the Indian past of the continent is suggested by the sounds of the earth; the times of the first explorers by the Angelus ("Ave Maria"). The music of the twentieth century, on the other hand, is one of syncopating jazz and throbbing machine.

The analogy between Roebling's bridge and Hegel's triad is useful because it helps to notate the variations at work in Crane's poem.⁶ As suggested, "To Brooklyn Bridge" is a prelude to the composition; similarly, "Ave Maria" is an aubade, "Cape Hatteras" a nocturne, and "Atlantis" a serenade which becomes, in Wallace Stevens's words, "a chant of paradise."⁷ It is in these terms that I wish to discuss The Bridge.

By coincidence, in Charles Ives's orchestral piece The Unanswered Question (1908), a solo trumpet, representing the artist, questions the nature of being. The response is a polytonal mockery of the trumpet's phrase. The artist, however, is undeterred, and the piece ends with the original question. In other words, the artist can transcend chaos even though he may not know the answer to his question. In "To Brooklyn Bridge," the poet determines to provide the answer to such a question. He emerges from the twentieth-century cave in which multitudes of his fellowmen bend hypnotically "toward some flashing scene" on which nothing is "disclosed." As a man "elect," in the Platonic and Romantic sense, the poet—the "other eyes"—realizes that he must make something of being in time in order to help the apparently hopeless urban bedlamites in their plight. Consequently, he sees the bridge, as only see-ers can, not simply as evidence of American technological ingenuity, but as a "harp and altar, of the fury fused." As a poet, he knows that it is his task to "align" the bridge's "choiringstrings." The resultant "Unfractioned idiom" of his song, it is hoped, will inspire Americans to live, like Camus's Sisyphus, with dignity and purpose. Like Dante in the dark wood, the poet waits under the bridge's "shadow by the piers," for only "in darkness is . . . [its] shadow clear." Like Orpheus the harpist, he will tune the bridge so that its "curveship lend a myth to God."

In "Ave Maria," the theme established in the proem is implicit only in the sense that Columbus bridged the Atlantic by crossing from the Old World to the New. In this the poem is a variation on the theme and an aubade in that it celebrates the morning of the New World. En route for Spain, Columbus knows that he has seen "what no perjured breath / Of clown nor sage can riddle or gainsay." Consequently, he brings back to Ferdinand and Isabella what he believes is "Cathay." As the ships come in sight of land, some sailors sing an Angelus while gathered around a mast. The Angelus, in accord with the aubade, is a devotional prayer sung at morning, as well as at noon and in the evening, to commemorate the Annunciation. In this case, perhaps, the secular intrudes as the incarnation of the New World is praised. The fact that the voyagers have been returned safely from the "passage to the Chan" is celebrated sacredly by the chanting of a Te Deum. Despite the praise and thanksgiving, the "Ave Maria" variation introduces an idée fixe which remains a subtheme of the poem. In discovering the New World, Columbus warns:

—Yet no delirium of jewels! O Fernando,
Take of that eastern shore, this western sea,
Yet yield thy God's, thy Virgin's charity!
—Rush down the plenitude, and you shall see
Isaiah counting famine on this lee!

The time between morning and noon, between "Ave Maria" and "Cape Hatteras," is devoted to chronological flashbacks in which the Indian past of the continent and the white man's misuse of the New World are evoked. In "The Harbor Dawn" (another aubade?), it is obvious that contemporary Americans have paid little attention to Columbus's warning. Asleep with a woman in a room in New York's dockland, the poet dreams of Pocahontas, his symbolic emanation of primal America. The dream affords "Insistently through sleep—a tide of voices." These are "signals dispersed in veils," warning the poet, perhaps, to transcribe the sounds of the past. In a Rossetti-ish lyric, Pocahontas is celebrated:

your hands within my hands are deeds;my tongue upon your throat—singingarms close; eyes wide, undoubtfuldarkdrink the dawn—
a forest shudders in your hair!

Despite these "Soft sleeves of sound," the modern world clamors for attention; outside the room, trucks lumber, engines throb, drunks howl. The virgin land is no longer "naked as she was" because "all the fort over" industrial America reverberates rapaciously.

The variation "Van Winkle" argues that "it's getting late," that things are falling apart: the "iron year" of the proem has clamped down on the land. "A hurdy-gurdy," once composed for by Haydn and Vivaldi, has degenerated into a street instrument which "grinds—/ Down gold arpeggios mile on mile." Despite this, "The grind-organ says . . . Remember, remember . . . Recall—recall." It is time, the poet warns, to get the "Times" before chaos comes.

In order to fully understand the "Times, " the poet must journey into the mythic past to transcribe and "recall" the sound and timbre of the continent for modern ears. This he does by taking a train into the Mississippi heartland of America. "The River" is to Hart Crane what The Water Music was to Handel: it is a brilliant evocation of "a world of whistles, wires and steam" which comprised "the telegraphic night" of twentieth-century America. To his benefactor Otto Kahn, Crane wrote:

The extravagance of the first twenty-three lines of this section is an intentional burlesque on the cultural confusion of the present—a great conglomeration of noises analogous to the strident impression of a fast express rushing by. The rhythm is jazz. (Letters, p. 306)

While the jazz is hard to scan, the "whistling" of the Twentieth Century Limited and the broken conversations of the hoboes, together with the cinematographic effect of the train speeding past "Tintex—Japalac—Certainteed Overalls ads," convey a society hell-bent on destruction. And so it will destroy itself if it does not slow down to hear again the sounds of its past. As long as the twentieth century rushes by "Papooses crying on the wind's long mane" and drowns the screams of "redskin dynasties," then the "iron" will always deal "cleavage." The "liquid theme that floating niggers swell" will and does subsume all.

In "The Dance," the poet journeys into the Indian past; in a triumph of the imagination, he transcends time—"the village"—for space—"dogwood." In this primal chant, the poet travels by canoe and foot, takes "the portage climb," gains "the ledge," speeds over "many bluffs, tarns, streams" until he comes to the "Grey tepees." In this savage world, there is no music except that of Nature and the Indians' "black drums." "A cyclone threshes in the turbine crest" describes the "eagle feathers" of the Sachem's headdress. When Maquokeeta and Pocahontas dance, fingers whistle, leaves crash, the dance moans, lightning twangs, flint snaps, "red fangs / And splay tongues thinly busy the blue air." As the dance tarantellas into a frenzy, the poet adds his voice to the primitive rite:

Dance, Maquokeeta! snake that lives before,
That casts his pelt, and lives beyond! Sprout,
horn!
Spark, tooth! Medicine-man, relent, restore—
Lie to us,—dance us. back the tribal morn!

After this Adamic plea, the poet throws himself into the ceremony and dies at the stake, hedgehogged like St. Sebastian by a hundred "arrows." From the experience, he discovers that while he cannot be both Indian and white man, the two can learn from each other. "Thewed of the levin, thunder-shod and lean," the poet sees the continent as a "bride immortal in the maize." America becomes "the torrent and the singing tree. / . . . virgin to the last of men. . . . " Having discovered that his "freedom is her largesse," that there is "sibilance" in her hair, he knows that "The serpent" and "the eagle" can coexist. In essence, "The Dance" is a ritual folk chant in which Indian, white man, land, and the age are reborn and the poet has a new song to sing.

While "Indiana" has been called an unsuccessful attempt to bridge the granting of America by the Indian to the white man, simply because the latter appropriated it unmercilessly, the poem does, nevertheless, provide a means for the poet to bring his song to the modern world. The "bison thunder" and the tempting "golden syllables" of fool's gold do not detain the poet in "A dream called Eldorado." Nothing was won "out of fifty-nine" and the poet leaves, like Melville's Ishmael, for the sea. The pioneer-woman who narrates this variation warns that her son, in this case the poet, will be "a ranger to the end." But unlike Robert in Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon, the poet will go beyond to "Where gold is true" and bridge the ocean to a new Atlantis.

In a letter to Otto Kahn, in which he set out his plan of The Bridge, Crane wrote of the next variation:

"Cutty Sark" is built on the plan of a fugue. Two "voices"—that of the world of Time, and that of the world of Eternity—are interwoven in the action. The Atlantis theme (that of Eternity) is the transmuted voice of the nickel-slot pianola, and this voice alternates with that of the derelict sailor and the description of the action. The airy regatta of phantom clipper ships seen from Brooklyn Bridge on the way home is quite effective, I think. It was a pleasure to use historical names for these lovely ghosts. Music still haunts their names long after the wind has left their sails. (Letters, pp. 307-08)

"Cutty Sark" is a verbal fugue which is written in contrapuntal style and consists of three voices: the poet's, the sailor's, and the singer's. As a fugue it introduces the theme of Atlantis. Whereas the poem does not begin with the theme, it is repeated throughout. Between each restatement, the counterpoint is divided into the respective voices of the poet and the sailor.

The part of the sailor is itself attuned to a contrapuntal variation in that he speaks of the past and the present. Of the latter, the reader learns that he cannot comprehend time and, "beating time" with "bony hands," he laments that "that / damned white Arctic killed" his time. He is unable to live on land, but, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, he has seen what others do not see. Consequently, he is trapped in time and condemned to wander, telling his tale to whoever is caught by his hypnotic "GREEN—/ eyes."

Scored against the ex-whaler's part is the song "Stamboul Nights" which is "jogged" out on "the nickel-in-the-slot piano."'Crane had read Plato's Critias, in which Atlantis is described as an imperfect utopia. Regardless of this, the submerged city became his ideal for a new America. The title of the song is related to the myth in that Istanbul stands on the Golden Horn and the citadel of Atlantis was encased with gold. But here the analogy ends, and the song encourages that America "Sing!" an ideal song which will transmute iron into gold, which will counterpoint the anthem that climaxes The Bridge. The poet's "clipper dreams" which conclude "Cutty Sark" affirm the great days of American mercantile expansionism. With this recitative, counterpointed by the sea-shanty "Sweet opium and tea, Yoho!" the poet is able to start "walking home across the Bridge. . . . "

"Cape Hatteras" is the center of Hart Crane's poem. It is not only a lauda to modern America and a panegyric to Walt Whitman, but also a nocturne in which the melody—that of technological achievement—is played over by a broken chord accompaniment—that of a restatement of Columbus's warning. If "Ave Maria" represented the morning of the New World, then "Cape Hatteras" represents its noon. The poem presents America at its zenith, the still point from which no advance is possible. The sound of the continent is no longer thunder or plainsong but industrial boom. In a passage that might have been penned by Marinetti and the Futurists, Crane scored the cacophony of this world:

The nasal whine of power whips a new universe ...
Where spouting pillars spoor the evening sky,
Under the looming stacks of the gigantic power
house
Stars prick the eyes with sharp ammoniac
proverbs,
New verities, new inklings in the velvet hummed
Of dynamos, where hearing's leash is strummed ...

Power's script,—wound, bobbin-bound, refined—
Is stropped to the slap of belts on booming spools,
spurred
Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the
stars.
Towards what? The forked crash of split thunder
parts
Our hearing momentwise; but fast in whirling
armatures,
As bright as frogs' eyes, giggling in the girth
Of steely gizzards—axle-bound, confined
In coiled precision, bunched in mutual glee
The bearings glint,—O murmurless and shined
In oilrinsed circles of blind ecstasy!

The time is 1903, when from "Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk" in North Carolina, "Two brothers in their twinship left the dune." These were the "windwrestlers" Orville and Wilbur Wright, whose power-driven biplane revolutionized aeronautics and then wrote the "prophetic script" from which "The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches." But this invention, like the discovery of the New World, has been misused: it has been "employed to fly / War's fiery kennel." "Each plane" became, during the Great War, "a hurtling javelin of winged ordnance." Just as Columbus warned Ferdinand, so the poet advises that the "Upchartered choristers" who "splintered space" must determine the zenith of America, not its nadir:

. .. Remember, Falcon-Ace,
Thou hast there in thy wrist a Sanskrit charge
To conjugate infinity's dim marge—
Anew ... !

In the immoderately Baroque eulogy to Whitman, Crane projected the "Ascensions" of his mentor into the persona of his poet. Whitman, whose "wand" had beaten "a song" in the nineteenth century, was for Crane the epitome of "living brotherhood" and champion of the "Years of the Modern." As a mythmaker, Whitman saw himself as the means (a bridge?) whereby ecstatic union with all things was possible, that he was, indeed, "Our Meistersinger" who, "Beyond all sesames of science," was able to "bind us throbbing with one voice." By invoking the spirit of Whitman, by partaking of the "Panis Angelicus," the poet can "span on even wing" that "great Bridge" of which he sings.

The "Three Songs" are a variation on the effects of a New World which has been un-paradised by generations of modern men. As emanations of Pocahontas, the symbol of that Edenic world, Eve, Magdalene, and Mary are a trio as off-key as "SCIENCE—COMMERCE and the HOLYGHOST" ("The River"). As the epigraph from Marlowe suggests, the poet must bridge the past with the present in the same way that Leander swam the Hellespont to re-sing Hero. Only in the unification of Abydos and Sestos could the lovers hope for a future. Each of the songs in Section V is a variation on a theme of America.

In "Southern Cross," Eve is "gardenless"; she is "homeless" in a "whispering hell" of a world whose disharmony is strummed on "Windswept guitars." As a symbol of the continent, she is innocence undone: a spent woman of "many arms." Now "docile," she is at the mercy of a tuneless age.

In "National Winter Garden," Magdalene is a whore who burlesques her dignity by stripping to "A tom-tom scrimmage with a somewhere violin." Beneath America's "ruby" and "emerald sheen" there is an "empty trapeze" of "flesh."

"Virginia," on the other hand, presents a land whose "high carillon" is rung on "popcorn bells." Cacophony, it is stressed, has tolled the continent into soundlessness. In a wry inversion, the prostitution of America has created a chastity so tight that Mary, like Rapunzel, is unable to let her hair down and show off her real beauty. But there is in the final admonition "shine!" a distant echo of the exhortations "flow!" ("The River") and "Sing!" ("Cutty Sark"). It is, after all, "Spring in Prince Street," and there is hope of the summer yet to be.

In "Quaker Hill," the poet travels to New England which was, for the Founding Fathers, "the Promised Land." Instead, he discovers that, as Columbus warned, "plenitude" ("Ave Maria") has been rushed down: the old "Meeting House" has become the "New Avalon Hotel." To the "persuasive suburban land agent" and the "highsteppers" this is paradise, an elysium of "gin fizz" and golf, dirty weekends and "plaid plusfours." In an allusion to the Purgatorio, "the borders of three states" and the "four horizons that no one relates" suggest that the three Theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, and the four Cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, synonymous with Puritanism, are no more.⁸ The volcanic roar of the radio and an unconcerned Babbittry sound the dissonant "famine" ("Ave Maria") of the day. The poet is unable, in Emily Dickinson's phrase, to see "New Englandly" and exclaims: "Where are my kinsmen and the patriarch race?" Despite the razzmatazz of Prohibition America, the poet never loses sight of the ideal:

.. . Yes, while the heart is
wrung,
Arise—yes, take this sheaf of dust upon your
tongue!
In one last angelus lift throbbing throat—
Listen, transmuting silence with that stilly note
Of pain that Emily, that Isadora knew!

He has learned, particularly from Emily Dickinson, that joy is often the result of pain; consequently, the bridging of America will be achieved out ofdiscord and cadence. In order to re-sound the "triple-noted clause" he must, like Orpheus, descend into the underworld.

"The Tunnel" is Hart Crane's variation on the dark night of the soul. The poem is a polytextual borrowing from mythology, Dante, and Poe, who appears as a symbol of the crucified artist. To all intents and purposes, "the garden" of America is "dead." The city has become a Baudelairean hell. To escape the "Performances, assortments, résumés" of this urban inferno, the poet takes the subway from Manhattan under the East River to the Brooklyn side of the bridge. Once in a subway car, "the overtone of motion / underground, the monotone / of motion is the sound / of other faces, also underground" prepare the poet for the staccato conversations of his fellow passengers:

"Let's have a pencil Jimmy—living now
at Floral Park
Flatbush—on the fourth of July—
like a pigeon's muddy dream—potatoes
to dig in the field—travlin the town—too—
night after night—the Culver line—the
girls all shaping up—it used to be—"

Just what "used to be" is lost as "tongues recant like beaten weather vanes." "Repetition freezes" as an enraged obligato jars above the other broken descant:

".. . if
you don't like my gate why did you
swing on it, why didja
swing on it
anyhow—"

The poet hears "The phonographs of hades" and as the journey continues he confronts yet another emanation of Pocahontas. This time it is a "Wop washerwoman" who may also be a variation on Columbus's "Madre Maria." Whoever she is, she has no influence in this subutopian world where "the Daemon" rules. This specter, an inversion perhaps of Eurydice, whose "hideous laughter is a bellows mirth," does not cause the poet to turn. In a Christian conversion, he becomes "like Lazarus" determined to ascend and emerges on the other side, like Leander, "Impassioned with some song," with "some Word that will not die." As suggested by the epigraph from Blake's "Morning," the poet has found "the Western path / Right thro' the Gates of Wrath."

So far, Crane has demonstrated that his duty as a poet was to remind the present of the usable past. By scoring the two into concord, he was able to compose "Atlantis," the ultimate harmony of The Bridge, of which R.W.B. Lewis has written:

"Atlantis" is Crane's supreme apocalypse of imagination, the revelation of universal radiance and harmony, of a world transfigured; a revelation begotten and (for the brief duration of the poem) sustained by the sheer power of poetic vision.⁹

In the musical structure of The Bridge, "Atlantis" is an evening serenade which courts the ideal. But it is as a "Psalm of Cathay"—not the "poetic rant of an extravagant order" that Lewis suggests—that the bridging of the real with the ideal is celebrated.¹⁰ Just as Atlantis's circle of islands was bridged so that all the inhabitants could be in communion with the citadel, so the poet used Brooklyn Bridge as his sacred object, his "palladium helm of stars," to harmonize the sounds of the past and the present into a polyphonic whole. As such, this poem is the "musica futuristica' of The Bridge.

"Atlantis" is the "One Song" which makes The Bridge a single structured composition. It celebrates the replacement of the "ROSE" ("Cutty Sark") by the "Anemone," the "whitest flower." But is it Cathay? Has the poet brought back "TheChan's great continent" ("Ave Maria")? As far as the poet is concerned, one may assume, Cathay is; the poem is testament to this. As far as the reader is concerned, he can only take the poet's word. The "Atlantis" section does, after all, conclude in oracular promise as "Whispers antiphonal in azure swing." As in the rustling of leaves at Delphi signifying prophecy, so there is in The Bridge a suggestion of the "Sibylline voices" that "flicker" as if "a god were issue of the strings" ("Atlantis").

The place of the poet's ideal, whether it be Atlantis or Cathay, is a land of music which is, in Plato's epigraph, "the knowledge of that which relates to love in harmony and system." It is also, as Lewis suggests, "the domain of love."¹¹ In Plato's Symposium, Eryximachus, in reminding the group that it is impossible to harmonize that which disagrees, argues:

In like manner rhythm is compounded of elements short and long, once differing and now in accord; which accordance, as in the former instance, medicine, so in all these other cases, music implants, making love and unison grow among them; and thus music, too, is concerned with the principles of love in their application to harmony and rhythm.

In order to achieve this, a good artist is required. The physician concludes with the insight that, as in music, the fairness of the muse Urania and the vulgarity of the muse Polyhymnia are both present in love.

In The Bridge, it was Hart Crane's personal aim to show that America could be reconciled imaginatively into a symphonic agreement. That he used musical and aural influences in the poem is evidence of that aim. As such, The Bridge is is no cozy celestial hymn; like many of Emily Dickinson's poems it constructs a bridge for the reader to take on a journey of self-exploration. As indicated by the epigraph from Isadora Duncan's autobiography that prefaces "Quaker Hill," Crane knew that "no ideals have ever been fully successful on this earth." Consequently, he scored an exhortation, from personal experience, that Americans at least attempt to rearrange the present dissonance by sounding out the tonality of the past. "A white hunter," to use Gertrude Stein's maxim, may be "nearly crazy,"'² but he is more likely to be in tune with his world than "the Czars / Of golf ("Quaker Hill").

The Bridge is, then, a polytextual variation which harmonizes the solution of one man's quest as a possible paradigm for individual or national exploration. It is not the "Answerer of all" ("Atlantis"), but a theme and free variation whereby questions are elicited.

¹The Letters of Hart Crane 1916-1932, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Hermitage House, 1952), pp. 128-29. Further references will be included in the text and cited as Letters.

²Gilbert Chase, America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present, rev. 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966), p. 631.

³From "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," pt. II, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1966). All citations to Crane's poetry are to this edition.

⁴Wilfrid Meilers, Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1964), p. 102.

⁵ Joseph J. Arpad, "Hart Crane's Platonic Myth: The Brooklyn Bridge," American Literature, 39 (1967), 78-79.

⁶ A triad is also a chord of three notes consisting of a root and the third and the fifth above it.

⁷ From Wallace Steven's "Sunday Morning," stanza VII.

⁸ Before descending into the Flowering Valley, Dante looks at the south pole and sees three stars (the three Theological virtues). These have replaced the four stars (the four Cardinal virtues) which he had seen at dawn. See Purgatorio VIII. 88-93.

⁹The Poetry of Hart Crane: A Critical Study (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 365-66.

¹⁰ Lewis, p. 366.

¹¹ Lewis, p. 372.

¹² From "Objects" in Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (New York: Claire-Marie, 1914), p. 27. (Rpt. New York: Haskell House Publishers Ltd., 1970.)