Today’s Poem: At Melville’s Tomb

Hart Crane’s chain of association

J.M.W. Turner, Rough Sea with Wreckage, c. 1843 (Wikimedia Commons)

There is a kind of poetry that moves by association, a loose metonymy that names something by something associated with it, then jumps to something associated with that association, then to some further association, and a further . . . and a further . . .

I’ve written on this topic before, but something in the sense it conveys about the deep stuff of language draws me back again and again. The logic of association is so fragile and fine-spun that it is always near breaking — thereby losing the reader’s ability to accept the next course of changes. Which is to say, losing the reader’s trust in the poet’s insight into the connections buried deep in language.

The most obvious instance of the beginnings of such associational chains is kennings in old Northern European poetry: “whale-path” for ocean and “battle-sweat” for blood in Beowulf, for example. But the long chain itself dominates the flow of the poem in such modern work as the 1926 “At Melville’s Tomb” by Hart Crane (1899–1932).

Crane is not as well-remembered as he should be. A major figure before his suicide at age 32, he still has admirers, but his dense poetry in the high modern style has little purchase on the stripped-down free verse that dominates academic poetry in America these days.

That’s a shame. His long 1930 work called The Bridge was inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge, near which Crane lived — and the poem is, in its way, a response to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Where Eliot saw only the shattering of culture, Crane perceived in the intersection of grand architecture and dynamic construction the possibility of something more optimistic than just modern devastation.

In “At Melville’s Tomb” we get the slide of metonymy building through stanza after stanza of Crane’s pentameter lines. In 1926, Harriet Monroe wrote to the editors of Poetry magazine to complain about the obscurity of the poem. Where Crane writes, “Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive / No farther tides,” for example, Monroe observes that “compass, quadrant and sextant” do not “contrive tides, they merely record them, I believe.”

And in reply, Crane wrote of what he called “the logic of metaphor.” “Its apparent illogic operates so logically in conjunction with its context in the poem as to establish its claim to another logic, quite independent of the original definition of the word or phrase or image thus employed.”

Hart Crane (Paris Review)

Consider the fact that, despite the claim of the title, Herman Melville doesn’t actually have a tomb. He’s buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, at a site that has neither the ledge Crane mentions in the poem’s first line nor a sightline to the ocean that Crane describes. We’re already in metonymy, and within that logic Crane forces us to take the ocean itself as Melville’s tomb, because of his association with the sea.

And then we slip to the sea’s association with the bodies of the drowned, and then to the dead rising, and then to what the dead might see among the stars, until Crane brings it all back with his strange, difficult-almost-beyond-meaning conclusion: “High in the azure steeps / Monody shall not wake the mariner. / This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.”

The chain is always threatening to break, yet Crane’s rich language and seriousness of purpose keep us from halting our suspension of disbelief as we follow along. He insists that all this means something deep, and we believe him, even when we can’t quite see what that deep meaning is.

---

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.

---