Reckoning ahead O soul, when thou, the time achiev’d,
The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done,
Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain’d,
As filled with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,
The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.
It’s arguable that the elided homosexual (and incestuous) resolution of the epigraphic passage confirms the homosexual subtext of the previous section, “Cutty Sark,” as it makes a bridge between “Cutty Sark” and “Cape Hatteras.”
The “Sanskrit charge” in the Falcon Ace’s wrist (again in “Cape Hatteras”), critic L. S. Dembo had opined, is another reference to the Absolute, via the passage following the epigraphic lines in Whitman’s poem:
Passage to more than India!
Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?
O soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those?
Disportest thou on waters such as those?
Soundest below the Sanskrit and the Vedas?
Then have thy bent unleash’d.
Note the development of “Cape Hatteras” from Crane’s initial narrative outline to the poem as written:
In Crane’s poem as outlined, it’s a dying southern soldier who calls to Whitman for aid and absolution. The poem is conceived as a narrated dialogue between them. At the end, deliriously the soldier calls out to the departed Whitman . . .
In Crane’s poem as realized, it’s a very pensive poet (who has, yes, lived through the Great War; there is reference to the Somme—as Whitman lived through the Civil War—and Appomattox), who calls to Whitman. And instead of a death-bed dialogue, the poem is now the poet’s reflective monologue—with only the plane crashes at its center providing a specific thanatopsis. At its end, however, deliriously, the poet calls to Whitman . . .
“[T]he eloquence of the dying man . . . is the substance of the dialogue,” Crane wrote in his outline: in the monologue as written, Crane has expanded that “substance” into the entire poem. Its ironies are still in place—or even further recomplicated: the reason that the yearned- for cleaving of hands cannot ultimately take place at the end of the poem as we have it is because Whitman, rather than the soldier, is dead. What remains of Whitman is the eloquence his language and vision have given to the poet/narrator.
In 1923 Crane had read and been impressed by Nation editor Oswald Garrison Villard’s recent biography of John Brown. And, in the outline, under the title “Calgary Express,” he wrote:
Well don’t you know it’s mornin’ time?
Wheel in middle of wheel;
He 11 hear yo’ prayers an’ sanctify,
Wheel in middle of wheel
The “scene” is a pullman sleeper, Chicago to Calgary. The main theme is the story of John Brown, which predominates over the interwoven “personal, biographical details” as it runs through the mind of a Negro porter, shining shoes and humming to himself. In a way it takes in the whole racial history of the Negro in America. The form will be highly original, and I shall use dialect. I hope to achieve a word-rhythm of pure jazz movement which will suggest not only the dance of the Negro but also the speed-dance of the engine over the rails.
And from the time of the briefer outline for “Cape Hatteras” he left this interesting sketch for “Ave Maria,” The Bridges opening section:
Columbus’ will—knowledge
Isabella’s will—Christ
Fernando’s will—gold
—3 ships
—2 destroyed
1 remaining will, Columbus
Over the next year when the bulk of the poems comprising The Bridge were written, Crane veered from, expanded on, broke, crossed, bridged, and abridged much of this template. A year later, in the early months of 1927, he sent Yvor Winters another, typewritten outline of the poem, this one in ten parts:
Projected Plan of the Poem
# Dedication—to Brooklyn Bridge
# 1—Ave Maria
2—Powhatan’s Daughter
# (1) The Harbor Dawn
# (2) Van Winkle
(3) The River
# (4) The Dance
(5) Indiana
3—Cape Hatteras
# 4—Cutty Sark
# 5—The Mango Tree
# 6—Three Songs
7—The Calgary Express
8—1920 Whistles
# 9—The Tunnel
# 10—Atlantis
Beside “The Mango Tree” Crane jotted a note to Winters by hand: “—may not use this” and, beside “1920 Whistles”: “—ditto.” Crane’s final handwritten comment across the page’s bottom:
Those marked # are completed.
“The Mango Tree” prose-poem was, yes, dropped. (That he was planning to mix prose-poetry in with his poetic series is the first suggestion, however faint, that at one point or another Crane might have had No-valis in mind.) “1920 Whistles” never became a separate poem. And eight stanzas of what he’d done on “The Calgary Express” Crane now appended to the closing section of “The River”—and abandoned the railroad poem. (Today it looks like rather astute poetic tact. Clearly Crane felt that his American poem should contain “the whole racial history of the Negro in America” but, as clearly, he felt he was not the one to write it.) Still, from the earlier outline, I. Columbus, II. Pok- ahantus, IV. Subway, and V. The Bridge are what we have today as I Ave Maria, II Powhatan’s Daughter, VII The Tunnel, and VIII Atlantis, so that the initial template is highly informative about what Crane ultimately and actually decided on.
The order of composition—which reveals its own internal logic—is “Atlantis,” “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge,” “Ave Maria,” “Cutty Sark,” “Van Winkle,” “The Tunnel,” “Harbor Dawn,” “Southern Cross,” “National Winter Garden,” and “Virginia.” After that, things become a bit murky. From then on the probable order is: “The Dance,” “The River,” “Calgary Express” (abandoned and cannibalized for “The Dance”), “Quaker Hill,” “Cape Hatteras.”
At the end of 1927, Stephen Vincent Benét—younger brother of critic William Rose Benét (who’d been notably hostile to Crane’s first, 1926 volume, White Buildings)—published his book-length poem, John Brown’s Body; over the next year it became a major, even enduring, middle-brow success. In it Whitman is a minor figure and John Brown a major presence. Though hardly any critic mentions it, surely Benét’s poem was a good reason for Crane to have dropped the John Brown narrative, if it was not simply a confirmation of the rightness of his earlier tendency to abandon the heavily foregrounded narratives he had once planned for the parts of The Bridge concerning Brown and Whitman.
Though we have already cited the Emerson passage that prompted Crane, sometime in 1926 or ’27, to change the title of his final (if first written) section of The Bridge from “Finale” to “Atlantis,” we are still left with a problem: what is the phenomenal effect of the new title of the poem’s closing section on the reader? What—or better, how—does it signify?
The problem of poetic sources (at whose rim we now totter) makes a vertiginous whirlpool directly beneath all serious attempts at poetic elucidation, now supporting them, now overturning them. For a most arbitrarily chosen example, take Gonzolo’s famous utopian expostulation in Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest (II, i., 148-173; the play is usually dated in its writing as just before its 1611 performance), on how he would run an ideal commonwealth set up on his isolate island:
I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things. For no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent pure;
 
; No sovereignty . . .
All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavor. Treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of it own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
Once we’ve ransacked our Elizabethan glossaries to ascertain that “contraries” here means “contrary to what is commonly expected,” that “traffic” means trade, that “service” means servants, “succession” inheritance, “tilth” tillage, “bourn” boundary, “engine” weapon, and “foison” abundance, we turn to Michel de Montaigne’s (1533–1593) essay, “Of the Cannibals,” in which Montaigne praises the American Indian nations for their savage innocence—an essay widely read in Elizabethan England—to discover (after a quote from Plato: “‘All things,’ saith Plato, ‘are produced by nature, by fortune, or by art. The greatest and fairest by one or other of the first two, the least and imperfect by the last.’”) the following passage (in John Florio’s 1603 translation) on an imagined ideal nation, suggested by the far-off lands of the American Indians:
It is a nation, I would answer Plato, that hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic superiority; no use of service, of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupations but idle; no respect of kindred but common, no apparel but natural, no manuring of land, no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon, were never heard amongst them. How dissonant would he [Plato] find this imaginary commonwealth from this perfection?
It is not just the ideas—which here and there, in fact, differ—that seem to have been ceded from Montaigne to the bard; rather it is impossible to imagine Shakespeare’s passage written without a copy of Montaigne to hand, if not underscored on the page then loosely in memory.
But even as we declare the above example arbitrary vis-à-vis Crane, the careful reader will remember that, at the close of “Cutty Sark,” among the great boats that Crane/the poet sees from the Bridge, their names in traditional italics, with all their suggestions of travel, the last one we find is, with a question mark, concluding the section, “Ariel?”—named after the airy sprite Shakespeare gives us in that same play, first as an androgynous fey, then (after line 316 of the play’s second scene), on next entrance, as a “water nymph” for the play’s remainder.
There is as little question that Crane’s interrogative “Ariel?” has its source in Shakespeare as there is that Shakespeare’s “metal, corn, or wine” (not to mention traffic, magistrate, letters, service, or commonwealth itself) has its source in Montaigne’s (via Florio’s) “wine, corn, or metal.”
But what about the utopian concerns that Shakespeare (at least for the length of Gonzalo’s speech) and Montaigne share? Crane’s use of Atlantis, of Cathay, within the American tradition, leans toward similar concern. Is the singular question of the single shared term “Ariel?” enough on which to ground an intertextual bridge between an Elizabethan England and a contemporaneous France and Crane’s vision in the American twenties? If so, what is its status? Historically, the “commonwealth” on which Montaigne literarily—and Shakespeare metaphorically—grounded a utopian vision is the same one that Strachy’s journals, quoted in William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain, presents: the journals from which Crane took (via Elizabeth Bowen’s review of Williams’s book) his epigraph for “Powhatan’s Daughter.” Here, perched on the most tenuous intertextual filaments, we are gazing down directly into the very maelstrom we began with, whose chaos casts its spume obscuring intention and origin, conscious choice and writerly history, source and filiation, where the signifieds accessible to the individual poet become hopelessly confounded with and blurred by the signifieds at large in what is called “culture,” all of them a-slip beneath the rhetorical storm, even as all greater poetic possibilities must rise over such turbulence to produce an effect of order, and in the name of such order soar above it.
Atlantis is traditionally the name for an island, or frequently a city, which had reached a pinnacle both of military might and of culture; it was swallowed up by the sea over a cataclysmic day and night’s tempest of torrential rains and earthquakes.
But, in The Bridge, after we read Crane’s title—“Atlantis”—we find, following it, not a description of an island city (however utopian or no), but, rather, a glorious evocation of the Brooklyn Bridge drenched by the moonlight. As such, then, the title does not caption the poem in the usual way of titles; the relation is rather, perhaps, sequential, suggesting another of Crane’s indirect mentions: first Atlantis, then the topic of the poem—the bridge, leading perhaps from, or to, that city. But is there anything else we can say about the still somewhat mysterious title, as it functions in the poem?
To answer this, we undertake what will surely seem our most eccentric digression, bridging centuries and seas and poetic history, though we hope to move only over fairly reasonable textual bridges . . .
Almost certainly (in a comparatively late decision), Crane took the title for The Bridge’s introductory section—“Proem”—from the poetic introduction of James Thomson’s (1834–1882) The City of Dreadful Night (1874). Certainly it’s the most likely, if not the only, place for him to have encountered the archaic word. (He might well have called the opening “Invocation,” “Prologue,” or any number of other possible titles; as late as ’27, he was calling it “Dedication.”) Thomson’s “Proem” contains the lines:
Yes, here and there some weary wanderer
In that same city of tremendous night
Will understand the speech, and feel a stir
Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight;
‘I suffer mute and lonely, yet another
Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother
Travels the same wild paths though out of sight.’
Many poets and readers over the years have felt themselves a “brother” to Thomson; and The City of Dreadful Night retains a certain extra-canonical fascination to this day. Much of Thomson’s poem (The “Proem” and sections 1, 3, 7, 9, 11, 13, 17, 19, and 21) falls, ironically enough, into the seven-line rhyme scheme of the usually light and happy French rondolet—though without the line-length variations (i.e., the traditionally defective first, third, and seventh lines) ordinarily found in that form: rather, for his purposes, Thomson used the more stately iambic pentameter for his moody monody. Thomson’s series has been popular with poets, eccentrics, and night lovers since its first publication over two issues of the National Reformer in 1874. George Meredith and George Eliot were among its earliest enthusiasts. But there is a good deal more shared between the two poetic series than simply the title of their opening sections. Both The Bridge and The City of Dreadful Night are largely urban poems, yet both have powerful extra-urban moments. As well, the variation in tone among The Bridge’s fifteen separate sections is very close to the sort of variation we find among the 21 sections of Thomson’s nocturnal meditation on hopelessness and isolation.
Indeed, it’s arguable that—granted the dialogue between them we’ve already mentioned—one purpose behind both The Waste Land and The Bridge was to write a poem, or poem series, of the sort for which Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night was the prototype; if, indeed, that was among the generating complexities of both poems, then certainly, on that front, Crane’s is the more successful.
Today, Thomson experts will sometimes talk of his poems “In the Room,” “Insomnia,” “Sunday at Hampstead,” and even his narrative “Waddah and Om-El-Bonain.” But to the vast majority of readers of English poetry, Thomson is (he is even so styled in several card catalogues, to distinguish him from his 18th Century ancestor of the same name, author of The Seasons [mentioned already] and The Castle of Indolence) the “author of The City of Dreadfu
l Night.”
James Thomson was born at Port Glasgow in Renfrewshire, a day or two more than a month before Christmas in 1834. His mother was a deeply, almost fanatically religious Irvingite. During a week of dreadful storms, his father, chief officer aboard the Eliza Stewart, suffered a paralytic stroke and was returned to his family an invalid, immobile on his right side, as well as mentally unsound—when James was six. Two years later, James’s mother enrolled her eight-year-old son in a boarding school, the Caladonian Asylum—and died a month or so later. His father was far too ill to take care of his sons. (James had, by now, a two-year-old brother and had already lost a two-year-old sister a couple of years before.) So James began the life of a scholarship/charity student at one or another boarding school or military academy over the next handful of years.
An extremely bright young man, by seventeen James was virtually a schoolmaster himself at the Chelsea Military Academy. His nickname from the Barnes family with whom he now lived was “Co”—for “precocious.” At sixteen he’d begun to read Shelley and, shortly after, the early German romantic, Novalis. Soon he was publishing poems regularly in London under the pseudonym “Bysshe Vanolis” (or, more usually, under the initial’s “B.V.”). Bysshe was, of course, Shelley’s middle name—and the name he was called by his friends. “Vanolis” was an anagram of Thomson’s new Germanic enthusiasm.
At eighteen Thomson became officially an assistant army schoolmaster—that is, a uniformed soldier who taught the children associated with Camp Curragh in the mornings and the younger soldiers themselves in the afternoon.
Novalis—the Latin term for a newly plowed field—was the penname of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), remembered for a mystical novel about a poet’s pursuit of a “blue flower” first seen in a dream, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and an intriguing set of notes and fragments, among them the famous “Monologue,” and the even more famous pronouncement, “Character is Fate”—as well, of course, as such wonderful observations as (in Carlyle’s fine translations from his 1829 essay of the young German poet):