Tuesday, February 02, 2021

Tribute to Melville

White Buildings: Poems
White Buildings: Poems 




Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.  -  from "Voyages", Hart Crane







Hart Crane loved Melville and read Moby-Dick several times along with his other tales of the sea. This was in the early decades of the twentieth century before Melville was renowned as one of America's greatest authors. Crane had a difficult time getting his trbute, "At Melville's Tomb", published. Harriet Monroe rejected it when he submitted it to her Poetry Magazine and Marianne Moore wanted to change it before publication in the Dial, which she edited. Crane withdrew it, but it was included in White Buildings, his first collection of poetry to be published. When Eugene O'Neill agreed to write a foreward to the collection Boni & Liveright chose to publish it. Ultimately O'Neill backed out, but Allen Tate provided a foreward and Crane's first collection of poetry was printed in book form.

At Melville’s Tomb
BY HART CRANE

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.


3 comments:

Brian Joseph said...

What you posted is really quality poetry. I do not think that I have read Crane before. I must read more f his work.

mudpuddle said...

wow... this reminds me of swimming under water: that dreamy state in which reality assumes magical shapes...

James said...

@Brian,
Crane was one of the most impressive poets of the first half of the twentieth century. His greatest poem "The Bridge" is on a par with the best of T. S. Eliot.


@mudpuddle,
I think you've got it. Crane's love for Moby-Dick permeates the poem.