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.
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?
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.
Oh wow. This one is really striking. Haunting.
I also found this: a Reddit thread in which someone notes that Alexandre Dumas uses the phrase "triste fruits" to refer to hanged men in 'Vicomte de Bragalonne' . A possible source for the image. Though it's always possible multiple people arrived at the same image independently.
https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/11v7y1l/did_alexandre_dumas_inspire_the_billie_holiday/
I first came across poems by Wylie when I was in high school (I don't recall which poems) but, under the spell of "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land," I thought her poems passé. Now I would rather read "Wild Peaches" than "The Waste Land," though of course Eliot's is an incomparably more important poem.
I can hardly react to the trolley poem now as if it were 1921--a year before "The Waste Land" was published, two years before Stevens' "Harmonium," a year after Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"--but from my not particularly well-informed perch it seems--to restate what you said, I think--like a traditional poem enlivened by the example of Imagism.
The substack essay on Landor and the epigram led me to J.V. Cunningham, a poet I knew from only a single poem. Born in 1911, he was present when Imagism was new. According to a critic, Cunningham was "suspicious of much of modern poetry’s reliance on imagery. 'For him, poetry must engage some outer reality not simply by pointing at it with an image or expressing a mood in relation to it; the poem must treat experience, make something of it'” (the critic is Steven Helmling, the quotation is at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/j-v-cunningham). Wylie's images evoke many layers of reality, but arguably they don't "treat experience, make something of it." The reader can do that, though.