The Poem
The Bridge belongs to the tradition of the long poem in America—they are works that ask philosophical and religious questions about life and the fate of nations. Walt Whitman was the originator of this mode of lyrical epic Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855. Others who followed Whitman’s techniques in the long poem include Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and Charles Olson wrote long poems in the post-World War II era. Hart Crane’s effort to write his own sequential work found a rich context from which to draw for ideas, allusions, echoes, and conscious reference.
Other classics of the modernist era had their influence on Crane’s poem. In particular, Crane was influenced by James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1922, a novel of modern Dublin life in which two characters are followed closely by the narrator as they go about their affairs over a single twenty-four-hour period. This absorption with a city and the emotional lives of its citizens gave Crane the basis for the organization of his poem about modern New York City. Joyce’s protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, is based on himself, as is Crane’s speaker in The Bridge, a sensitive young man who yearns for visionary enlightenment.
The Bridge is the last great poem of the modernist era, a period crowded with experiments in which Western culture and ideology underwent close scrutiny and sweeping revision. In essence, modernism was the rediscovery of the primitive world, where nature dominated human affairs, and myth, magic, and ritual were the principal forms of expression. Modernist writers rejected the artificiality of urban industrialism and celebrated the natural bonds between humans and wild nature as the more healthful and spiritually satisfying way. Most of these works responded to the religious crises of the early twentieth century by seeking alternative forms of vision and belief in non-Western traditions.
Crane’s poem begins with a paean, or hymn of praise, to the Brooklyn Bridge, John Augustus Roebling’s engineering wonder that spans the East River between Long Island and Manhattan. While composing this poem, Crane rented the apartment at 110 Columbia Heights from which Roebling had overseen the completion of his project. The section entitled “Proem” takes the angle of vision of that apartment window, which looked down at the bridge, and follows a sea gull as it rises up over the top of the bridge and disappears—a metaphor for imaginative flight. The reader contemplates the bridge at early dawn, at noon (when a suicide leaps from its parapets), then in the evening, when the poet admires its looming shadow against the snow falling on a cold December night, the end of the “iron year.”
What follows are eight sections of varying lengths and poetic forms, each with a thematic title. The longest section, part II, entitled “Powhatan’s Daughter,” contains five poems (the section runs to sixteen pages in most editions). Part IV, “Cape Hatteras,” has the longest poem of the group, an eight-page ode on the airplane as the new wonder of the industrial era. “The Tunnel,” which forms part VII, is a lyrical account of a subway ride back to Brooklyn. Other sections depict Columbus’ voyage back to Europe after his discovery of the New World (“Ave Maria”), the history of navigation on the Mississippi (“The River”), canoeing on the small rivers of Indian America (“The Dance”), the land migrations of the pioneers and gold-rushers (“Indiana”), and the adventures of merchant mariners and whalers (“Cutty Sark”). Large and diverse as the work may be, one of its unifying themes is transportation—what the bridge itself monumentalizes in its...
(This entire section contains 1279 words.)
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great span.
“Ave Maria” opens the sequence in stately eight-line stanzas that dramatize Columbus’ returning voyage to Spain after discovering what he thinks is China. He is disappointed, however, to return without a “delirium of jewels.” The discovery of America began in error and from motives of greed, but it ends with Columbus’s vision of the mysterious gods that rule time and space and of the human longing to discover “still one shore beyond desire!”
From this “dawn,” the reader begins the journey through the day and night to follow. “Powhatan’s Daughter” opens with a sinuous lyric on early waking. This is followed by the poem “Van Winkle”; Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years in Washington Irving’s tale and woke to find himself at the crossroads of American history, somewhere between its colonial origins and the sprawling macadam highways racing off into the future. His memories of the time before he slept, the childhood of the nation, preface the historical themes of the next three poems. “The River” recounts the migrations to the western territories by train and by Mississippi riverboat. Pioneering destroyed the wilderness and primal nature, however, and the human effort to conquer the land ends in a spent dream, as the river ends “turbid,/ Tortured with history” in the Gulf of Mexico.
“The Dance” that follows goes upriver by canoe to rediscover Amerindian culture. The presiding spirit over these poems is Pocahontas, the sensuous Indian princess who fell in love with John Smith and spared his life. The speaker imagines falling in love with Pocahontas, of mating with her and joining Indian life in the wilds. “Indiana” concludes the section with a dramatic monologue spoken by a tired, resigned pioneer wife whose husband joined the Colorado gold rush but, like others, lost the American dream. Columbus’ search for gold in “Ave Maria” began a futile search for El Dorado in the New World.
In “Cutty Sark,” an old mariner recounts his adventures at sea, sometimes as a whaler, and the reader looks down from the bridge to the ships in the harbor as the speaker returns home. “Cape Hatteras” is an ambitious ode composed in long paragraphs of iambic pentameter. This section pays homage to Whitman’s “Passage to India” (his hymn to the opening of the Suez Canal) before taking up its own subject, the Wright brothers’ inaugural airplane flight at Kitty Hawk (on Cape Hatteras, North Carolina) and the grim future of aircraft as war machines.
“Cape Hatteras” concludes Crane’s survey of the history of America to the early twentieth century. “Three Songs,” in part V, begins a commentary on the troubled present of America, depicting a culture that possesses wealth and power but lacks spiritual vision. As Henry Adams remarked in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), America lacks a female muse. Crane considers three types of muse—Eve, or motherhood; Magdalene, the seductress; and Mary, the goddess of imagination and wisdom—and finds only the last suitable as a spiritual guide. In “Quaker Hill,” the old religions have perished; they are viewed from an old Quaker graveyard, where a modern golf course and clubhouse now preside.
In “The Tunnel,” the reader plunges below the East River and enters the unconscious realm of American life. Here the roots of ghostly ideals are found, the old vision dating back to sunken Atlantis, as well as those subway riders who struggle in a living death of dispirited modern reality. T. S. Eliot accepted this poem for publication in his journal Criterion; it bears a close resemblance to Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) in its treatment of the modern city.
“Atlantis” brings the sequence to a close with its hymn to the bridge as both “harp,” or artistic instrument, and “altar,” or place of vision. The bridge spans many things at once, land and sea, earth and sky, self and soul, underworld and heaven. Its form articulates the link between realities and is the necessary symbol for a culture lacking in unity or faith.
Forms and Devices
The poem employs a welter of poetic forms, stanzaic patterns, and figures of speech. Its chief forms are the dramatic monologue, as used by Eliot, and the ode, an irregular, open form, as developed by John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley and raised to ecstatic meditation in Whitman. Monologues occur in “Ave Maria,” where Columbus speaks, and in “Indiana,” where a pioneer woman remembers her hard life; a dialogue poem occurs in “Cutty Sark,” interwoven with lyrics of various songs. “The Tunnel” uses several voices to enrich the meditation. The principal odes occur in “Cape Hatteras” and “Atlantis.” Though much of the language is based on iambic pentameter, the poems are essentially irregular and use a variety of rhythms to control shifting tones and moods in the work, as in an orchestral suite. The “Proem” uses “heroic couplets,” an epic convention that rhymes two lines of iambic pentameter; Crane’s rhymes are “slant,” or partial rhymes. Crane also favors the stately eight-line stanza for sombre subjects, as in “Ave Maria,” “Quaker Hill,” and “Atlantis,” and quatrains for lighter subjects, such as “The Harbor Dawn” and “The Dance.” Irregular stanzas of greater length indicate complex thinking and dense meditative structures, as in “Cape Hatteras” and “The Tunnel.”
Crane’s diction is notable for its lush, compacted phrases and for its range—from mannered eloquence and fragile images to jazzy lyrics and harsh, realistic descriptions. Metaphors abound on all the important objects of the poem: bridge, water, highways, the landmass, the underground. Everything is transformed from literal and earthbound description to visionary and spiritual abstraction. The towers of the bridge are musical “staves,” the cables the “orphic strings” of the harp; the women of “Three Songs” present myriad possibilities for their ultimate meaning. Eve, for example, is the constellation of the Southern Cross as well as mother, Venus, the source of “lithic trillions of your spawn,” the stars.
Elsewhere one finds a continuous thread of puns and wordplay on key images, as language reflects upon itself and transforms its literality into figuration and back again. A notable pun occurs in “Van Winkle,” in which Rip is asked upon waking, “Have you got your Times”—The New York Times, but also the new day to which he has rudely awakened. Typical of metaphoric brilliance is the description of a trout in a pond at night as a “moon whisper.” The bridge itself, in “Atlantis,” is a “flight of strings,” a “telepathy of wires,” and its traffic is a “crystal-flooded aisle.”
Places Discussed
*Brooklyn Bridge
*Brooklyn Bridge. Steel suspension bridge connecting New York City’s boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn that opened in 1883. Considered a masterpiece of modern architecture and engineering, it serves Crane’s poem as a symbol of unimaginable, divinelike power, as well as a bridge to the past, the America of Crane’s time, and to the future. Crane opens with a paean, or hymn of praise, to the bridge, While composing this poem, Crane rented the apartment in Columbia Heights from which the bridge’s designer, John Augustus Roebling, had overseen its construction. The section titled “Proem” takes the angle of vision of that apartment window, which looked down at the bridge, and follows a sea gull as it rises up over the top of the bridge and disappears—a metaphor for imaginative flight.
*New York City
*New York City. Crane’s vision of America’s largest city is ambiguous. On one hand, “Proem” and “The Tunnel” depict a city resembling London in T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem “The Waste Land,” which contrasts a sordid contemporary urban environment with an idealized past. In Crane’s poem, many of New York’s famous streets exemplify a similar contrast: Avenue A, Broadway, Fourteenth Street, Chambers Street, Bleeker Street, and Prince Street. On the other hand, in “Proem” and “Atlantis,” New York’s Brooklyn Bridge represents the greatest achievement of modern man.
*Cathay
*Cathay. Medieval name for northern China, the fabled Orient and a land of spices and riches. Crane uses it here as the first of a series of “promised lands,” including Atlantis, Avalon, and America. These idealized places are backdrops for the modern mechanical age, which, too, has enormous potential and great dangers.
River
River. The central image of “The River” is the Mississippi River, which flows past Cairo, Illinois, where it is joined by the Ohio River and symbolizes freedom and continuity. Although most of the section actually is set first on a train and among hoboes crossing the country, the river, like the bridge, connects past and present America.
*Cape Hatteras
*Cape Hatteras. North Carolina promontory where Orville and Wilbur Wright flew their first airplane from the hill at Kitty Hawk. Crane speculates both on the awesome power of modern machines, embodiments of the creative power of the imagination and, potentially, destructive of human values.
Quaker Hill
Quaker Hill. New England location with an old hotel called the Mizzentop, a beautiful relic of a more glorious time sullied by modern commercialism that has replaced the earlier peace and tranquillity of the Quaker religious meeting.
Bibliography
Brunner, Edward. Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of “The Bridge.” Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Despite its title, this work sets out to disprove the conventional wisdom that Crane’s was a largely undisciplined and reckless talent. The Bridge is the culmination of Crane’s continuing effort to hone his craft.
Clark, David R., ed. Studies in “The Bridge.” Westerville, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1970. A compilation of fourteen essays, providing a road map of critical responses to the poem virtually from the time of its publication to the 1960’s. Most of the major commentators are represented.
Crane, Hart. The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932. Edited by Brom Weber. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952. Crane was an astute critic of his own work and that of others. Offers many insights into The Bridge.
Horton, Phillip. Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet. New York: Viking Press, 1957. Written with the cooperation of Crane’s mother, this biography is like a novel in its sense of drama. It does not stint on insightful analyses of Crane’s poetry.
Paul, Sherman. Hart’s Bridge. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1972. The first book-length treatment of Crane’s masterwork. The Bridge required Crane to achieve the maturity of vision and technique required of epic poetry.