Today’s Poem: A Crowded Trolley Car

Elinor Wylie’s Imagist view of the human soul

Passengers boarding streetcar, Seattle, 1920s (Wikimedia Commons)

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A Crowded Trolley Car 

by Elinor Wylie 

The rain’s cold grains are silver-gray 
Sharp as golden sands, 
A bell is clanging, people sway 
Hanging by their hands. 
 
Supple hands, or gnarled and stiff, 
Snatch and catch and grope; 
That face is yellow-pale, as if 
The fellow swung from rope. 
 
Dull like pebbles, sharp like knives, 
Glances strike and glare, 
Fingers tangle, Bluebeard’s wives 
Dangle by the hair. 
 
Orchard of the strangest fruits 
Hanging from the skies; 
Brothers, yet insensate brutes 
Who fear each others’ eyes. 
 
One man stands as free men stand 
As if his soul might be 
Brave, unbroken; see his hand 
Nailed to an oaken tree. 

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In Today’s Poem, by the American Modernist poet Elinor Wylie (1885–1928), an observer meditates on the hands of people standing in a streetcar, holding to the bar and the looped straps.  The poem, in common-meter abab quatrains, turns on the tacit assumption, perhaps ebbing away from us in our increasingly automated world, that the state of a person’s hands discloses that person’s station in life: a manual laborer or a man of leisure. In his hands, the poem assumes, a person’s story may be read.  

In this poem, from Wylie’s 1921 collection Nets to Catch the Wind, we can see the Imagist influence of the previous decade, though without the rejection of traditional rhyme and meter apparent in the work of such contemporaries as Mina Loy. As the poem roves with the speaker’s eye down the trolley car, each visual image, tersely drawn, opens out into a complex of association and meaning. In these hands, the poem reads and retells a larger story of sinand death, but also, possibly, escape and redemption. 

In the first stanza, the rain’s gray sharpness suggests, paradoxically, the dry “golden” sand of a Red Sea parting, an escape from bondage. With the image of people “hanging by their hands,” the stanza ends in a hint of things to come. The second stanza’s glimpsed face, “yellow-pale,” extends that image, recalling a hanged man in all his archetypes: Absolom? Judas? Criminal, victim, suicide? 

Elinor Wylie (Wikimedia Commons)

In the third, meanwhile, a row of fingers “tangled” on the bar above the seats evokes for the speaker the murdered wives of Bluebeard, the fairy-tale villain. In the tale, Bluebeard’s final wife, opening the forbidden door in the castle, discovers her predecessors hung up like so many sides of beef and, so alerted, is enabled to avoid their fate. The horrific vision becomes, for that wife, a means of escape, the door to death a door to life. 

This association melts, in the following stanza, into a vision of human bodies as fruit, heavy on the boughs of an orchard. Again, the image is multilayered. We see the literal people, degraded and brutish in the pitiless light of the car, swaying with its motion. But we might also discern the Garden of Eden, the fruit of the Fall, and also the “strange fruit” of lynchings, superimposed on, or integrated into, the literal scene, in a conflation of physical and spiritual alienation, degradation, and death.  

But contra the despair that we often associate with early-20th-century Modernism, the poem doesn’t leave us there. The final stanza, with its one “brave, unbroken” soul and its closing allusion to the Crucifixion — the man who hangs by his hands — implicitly circles back, like the trolley on its rounds, to the freedom glimpsed, in the opening stanza, through deadening veils of rain.  

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