Through surf, its bird note there a long time falling. Near Paumanok - your long patrol - and heard the wraith By the fourth sonnet, Crane writes,īe still the same as when you walked the beach This emotional intimacy only intensifies over the length of the poem. The direct address of Whitman by his first name, with the easy intimacy, an intimacy that is not previously assumed in the poetic cycle, but that seems to suit both Crane and the addressee. Crane, however, assumes immediately an intimacy with Whitman at the end of the fir sonnet, writing, “Or to read you, Walt,-knowing us in thrall//to that deep wonderment”. I read it as a sonnet sequence of sixteen sonnets, the classic cycle for love poems. While “Cutty Sark” is a meditation on public sex (and concludes I think with the loneliness of these encounters as the sailors “turned and left us on the lee”), “Cape Hatteras” is a love poem to Walt Whitman. The docks in New York and the Bowery both spaces where white machines continued to sing and the geyser of life sang beautifully until we walked home to Brooklyn or Jersey. I am struck reading these passages how the language of the experience of public gay male sexuality from the 1920s as captured her in the poetic artifice is not so different from the language and imagery of public gay male sexuality from my own coming out in the 1980s and 1990s. I started walking home across the Bridge. Was putting the Statue of Liberty out - that The poets continues on through this experience at the docks leading to this final four lines Or they may start some white machine that sings. Or are there frontiers-running sands sometimes I saw the frontiers gleaming of his mind Lines like, “O life’s a geyser-beautiful-my lungs-/No-I can’t live on land-!”, lead to this orgasmic conclusion, This montage is orgiastic in both it’s conception and poetic execution. The next parts of this poem, Crane captures the drunken impressions of the experience in brief and fleeting song lyrics and overheard snippets of conversation. Crane begins, “I met a man in South Street, tall-/a nervous shark tooth swung on his chain.” He then describes the man’s green eyes “forgot to look at you/or left you several blocks away-”. The narrative of “Cutty Sark” is meeting a man at the docks in New York City. The middle two parts of this poem, “Cutty Sark” and “Cape Hatteras,” are in different ways as sexual as much of Whitman’s work. That’s where I’ll begin thinking about it now. I didn’t know how homoerotic this text was. Most of this I knew before picking up The Bridge to read last week. All of the parts have strong formal elements at play and all are reaching to defining and participating in an “American” poetic aesthetic. The Bridge is seen by Crane as a singular long poem that is broken into eight parts. It was also his last as he committed suicide in 1932 at the age of 33. The Bridge was published in 1930 and was Crane’s most widely read and praised work. I want to start out with the text of Hart Crane’s The Bridge.
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