Bibliographic Information Author Crane, Hart Genre Poetry Journal or Book The Collected Poems of Hart Crane Publisher Liveright Publishing Corporation Year of Publication 1933 Pages 31-39 Additional information - animal East The seas all crossed, weathered the capes, the voyage done... —WALT WHITMAN Imponderable the dinosaur sinks slow, the mammoth saurian ghoul, the eastern Cape.. animal East While rises in the west the coastwise range, slowly the hushed land— Combustion at the astral core—the dorsal change Of energy—convulsive shift of sand... But we, who round the capes, the promontories Where strange tongues vary messages of surf Below grey citadels, repeating to the stars The ancient names—return home to our own Hearths, there to eat an apple and recall The songs that gypsies dealt us at Marseille Or how the priests walked—slowly through Bombay— Or to read you, Walt,—knowing us in thrall West engine metaphor coast intertext To that deep wonderment, our native clay Whose depth of red, eternal flesh of Pocahontus— Those continental folded aeons, surcharged With sweetness below derricks, chimneys, tunnels— Is veined by all that time has really pledged us... And from above, thin squeaks of radio static, The captured fume of space foams in our ears— What whisperings of far watches on the main Relapsing into silence, while time clears Our lenses, lifts a focus, resurrects A periscope to glimpse what joys or pain Our eyes can share or answer—then deflects Us, shunting to a labyrinth submersed Where each sees only his dim past reversed... Native American infrastructure oil technology sound But that star-glistered salver of infinity, The circle, blind crucible of endless space, Is sliced by motion,—subjugated never. Adam and Adam's answer in the forest Left Hesperus mirrored in the lucid pool. Now the eagle dominates our days, is jurist Of the ambiguous cloud. We know the strident rule Of wings imperious... Space, instantaneous, Flickers a moment, consumes us in its smile: A flash over the horizon—shifting gears— And we have laughter, or more sudden tears. Dream cancels dream in this new realm of fact From which we wake into the dream of act; Seeing himself an atom in a shroud— Man hears himself an engine in a cloud! night animal car part stars engine metaphor driving "—Recorders ages hence"—ah, syllables of faith! Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity Be still the same as when you walked the beach Near Paumanok—your lone patrol—and heard the wraith Through surf, its bird note there a long time falling... For you, the panoramas and this breed of towers, Of you—the theme that's statured in the cliff, O Saunterer on free ways still ahead! Not this our empire yet, but labyrinth Wherein your eyes, like the Great Navigator's without ship, Gleam from the great stones of each prison crypt Of canyoned traffic... Confronting the Exchange, Surviving in a world of stocks,—they also range Across the hills where second timber strays Back over Connecticut farms, abandoned pastures,— Sea eyes and tidal, undenying, bright with myth! intertext traffic metaphor agriculture animal The nasal whine of power whips a new universe... Where spouting pillars spoor the evening sky, Under the looming stacks of the gigantic power house Stars prick the eyes with sharp ammoniac proverbs, New verities, new inklings in the velvet hummed Of dynamos, where hearing's leash is strummed... Power's script,—wound, bobbin-bound, refined— Is stropped to the slap of belts on booming spools, spurred Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the stars. Towards what? The forked crash of split thunder parts Our hearing momentwise; but fast in whirling armatures, As bright as frogs' eyes, giggling in the girth Of steely gizzards—axle-bound, confined In coiled precision, bunched in mutual glee The bearings glint,—O murmurless and shined In oilrinsed circles of blind ecstasy! sound pollution infrastructure oil car part thunder animal Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas, The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space... O sinewy silver biplane, nudging the wind's withers! There, from Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk Two brothers in their twinship left the dune; Warping the gale, the Wright windwrestlers veered Capeward, then blading the wind's flank, banked and spun What ciphers risen from prophetic script, What marathons new-set between the stars! The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches Already knows the closer clasp of Mars,— New latitudes, unknotting, soon give place To what fierce schedules, rife of doom apace! night stars wind speed plane Behold the dragon's covey—amphibian, ubiquitous To hedge the seaboard, wrap the headland, ride The blue's cloud-templed districts unto ether... While Iliads glimmer through eyes raised in pride Hell's belt springs wider into heaven's plumed side. O bright circumferences, heights employed to fly War's fiery kennel masked in downy offings,— This tournament of space, the threshed and chiselled height, Is baited by marauding circles, bludgeon flail Of rancorous grenades whose screaming petals carve us Wounds that we wrap with theorems sharp as hail! intertext Wheeled swiftly, wings emerge from larval-silver hangars. Taut motors surge, space-gnawing, into flight; Through sparkling visibility, outspread, unsleeping, Wings clip the last peripheries of light... Tellurian wind-sleuths on dawn patrol, Each plane a hurtling javelin of winged ordnance, Bristle the heights above a screeching gale to hover; Surely no eye that Sunward Escadrille can cover! There, meaningful, fledged as the Pleiades With razor sheen they zoom each rapid helix! Up-chartered choristers of their own speeding They, cavalcade on escapade, shear Cumulus— Lay siege and hurdle Cirrus down the skies! While Cetus-like, O thou Dirigible, enormous Lounger Of pendulous auroral beaches,—satellited wide By convoy planes, moonferrets that rejoin thee On fleeing balconies as thou dost glide, —Hast splintered space! metaphor car speed visibility driving wind car part weapon intertext technology Low, shadowed of the Cape, Regard the moving turrets! From grey decks See scouting griffons rise through gaseous crepe Hung low... until a conch of thunder answers Cloud-belfries, banging, while searchlights, like fencers, Slit the sky's pancreas of foaming anthracite Toward thee, O Corsair of the typhoon,—pilot, hear! Thine eyes bicarbonated white by speed, O Skygak, see How from thy path above the levin's lance Thou sowest doom thou hast nor time nor chance To reckon—as thy stilly eyes partake What alcohol of space...! Remember, Falcon-Ace, Thou hast there in thy wrist a Sanskrit charge To conjugate infinity's dim marge— Anew...! plane But first, here at this height receive The benediction of the shell's deep, sure reprieve! Lead-perforated fuselage, escutcheoned wings Lift agonized quittance, tilting from the invisible brink Now eagle-bright, now quarry-hid, twist- -ing, sink with Enormous repercussive list- -ings down Giddily spiralled gauntlets, upturned, unlooping In guerrilla sleights, trapped in combustion gyr- Ing, dance the curdled depth down whizzing Zodiacs, dashed (now nearing fast the Cape!) down gravitation's vortex into crashed ...dispersion...into mashed and shapeless débris.... By Hatteras bunched the beached heap of high bravery! plane * The stars have grooved our eyes with old persuasions Of love and hatred, birth,—surcease of nations... But who has held the heights more sure than thou, O Walt!—Ascensions of thee hover in me now As thou at junctions elegiac, there, of speed With vast eternity, dost wield the rebound seed! The competent loam, the probable grass,—travail Of tides awash the pedestal of Everest, fail Not less than thou in pure impulse inbred To answer deepest soundings! O, upward from the dead Thou bringest tally, and a pact, new bound, Of living brotherhood! intertext Thou, there beyond— Glacial sierras and the flight of ravens, Hermetically past condor zones, through zenith havens Past where the albatross has offered up His last wing-pulse, and downcast as a cup That's drained, is shivered back to earth—thy wand Has beat a song, O Walt,—there and beyond! And this, thine other hand, upon my heart Is plummet ushered of those tears that start What memories of vigils, bloody, by that Cape,— Ghoul-mound of man's perversity at balk And fraternal massacre! Thou, pallid there as chalk, Hast kept of wounds, O Mourner, all that sum That then from Appomattox stretched to Somme! Cowslip and shad-blow, flaked like tethered foam Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring When first I read thy lines, rife as the loam Of prairies, yet like breakers cliffward leaping! O, early following thee, I searched the hill Blue-writ and odor-firm with violets, 'til With June the mountain laurel broke through green And filled the forest with what clustrous sheen! Potomac lilies, — then the Pontiac rose, And Klondike edelweiss of occult snows! White banks of moonlight came descending valleys— How speechful on oak-vizored palisades, As vibrantly I following down Sequoia alleys Heard thunder's eloquence through green arcades Set trumpets breathing in each clump and grass tuft—'til Gold autumn, captured, crowned the trembling hill! Panis Angelicus! Eyes tranquil with the blaze Of love's own diametric gaze, of love's amaze! Not greatest, thou,—not first, nor last,—but near And onward yielding past my utmost year. Familiar, thou, as mendicants in public places; Evasive—too—as dayspring's spreading arc to trace is:— Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel; And it was thou who on the boldest heel Stood up and flung the span on even wing Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing! Years of the Modern! Propulsions toward what capes? But thou, Panis Angelicus, hast thou not seen And passed that Barrier that none escapes— But knows it leastwise as death-strife?—O, something green, Beyond all sesames of science was thy choice Wherewith to bind us throbbing with one voice, New integers of Roman, Viking, Celt— Thou, Vedic Caesar, to the greensward knelt! And now, as launched in abysmal cupolas of space, Toward endless terminals, Easters of speeding light— Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace On clarion cylinders pass out of sight To course that span of consciousness thou'st named The Open Road—thy vision is reclaimed! What heritage thou'st signalled to our hands! infrastructure road engine car part vision And see! the rainbow's arch—how shimmeringly stands Above the Cape's ghoul-mound, O joyous seer! Recorders ages hence, yes, they shall hear In their own veins uncancelled thy sure tread And read thee by the aureole 'round thy head Of pasture-shine, Panis Angelicus! Yes, Walt, Afoot again, and onward without halt,— Not soon, nor suddenly,—No, never to let go My hand in yours, Walt Whitman— so— road rainbow intertext
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# QUERY2ba7d71c9bded93b6a2862f6a6a65ef4
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# ERR9d760f30b61a3a82f02ea47777882557
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 03e68e4cfd608d0e37ca1affafab03a2
To that deep wonderment, our native clay Whose depth of red, eternal flesh of Pocahontus— Those continental folded aeons, surcharged With sweetness below derricks, chimneys, tunnels— Is veined by all that time has really pledged us... And from above, thin squeaks of radio static, The captured fume of space foams in our ears— What whisperings of far watches on the main Relapsing into silence, while time clears Our lenses, lifts a focus, resurrects A periscope to glimpse what joys or pain Our eyes can share or answer—then deflects Us, shunting to a labyrinth submersed Where each sees only his dim past reversed...
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 55cf735c56a111a10b4adb32855c51af
But that star-glistered salver of infinity, The circle, blind crucible of endless space, Is sliced by motion,—subjugated never. Adam and Adam's answer in the forest Left Hesperus mirrored in the lucid pool. Now the eagle dominates our days, is jurist Of the ambiguous cloud. We know the strident rule Of wings imperious... Space, instantaneous, Flickers a moment, consumes us in its smile: A flash over the horizon—shifting gears— And we have laughter, or more sudden tears. Dream cancels dream in this new realm of fact From which we wake into the dream of act; Seeing himself an atom in a shroud— Man hears himself an engine in a cloud!
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# c6c95dbd50054f14dbc009760f87460a
"—Recorders ages hence"—ah, syllables of faith! Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity Be still the same as when you walked the beach Near Paumanok—your lone patrol—and heard the wraith Through surf, its bird note there a long time falling... For you, the panoramas and this breed of towers, Of you—the theme that's statured in the cliff, O Saunterer on free ways still ahead! Not this our empire yet, but labyrinth Wherein your eyes, like the Great Navigator's without ship, Gleam from the great stones of each prison crypt Of canyoned traffic... Confronting the Exchange, Surviving in a world of stocks,—they also range Across the hills where second timber strays Back over Connecticut farms, abandoned pastures,— Sea eyes and tidal, undenying, bright with myth!
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 689b7f4509c23fee0ba6d29fba0df55c
The nasal whine of power whips a new universe... Where spouting pillars spoor the evening sky, Under the looming stacks of the gigantic power house Stars prick the eyes with sharp ammoniac proverbs, New verities, new inklings in the velvet hummed Of dynamos, where hearing's leash is strummed... Power's script,—wound, bobbin-bound, refined— Is stropped to the slap of belts on booming spools, spurred Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the stars. Towards what? The forked crash of split thunder parts Our hearing momentwise; but fast in whirling armatures, As bright as frogs' eyes, giggling in the girth Of steely gizzards—axle-bound, confined In coiled precision, bunched in mutual glee The bearings glint,—O murmurless and shined In oilrinsed circles of blind ecstasy!
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 3c50fdffb2665e8d7260834ae7219d06
Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas, The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space... O sinewy silver biplane, nudging the wind's withers! There, from Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk Two brothers in their twinship left the dune; Warping the gale, the Wright windwrestlers veered Capeward, then blading the wind's flank, banked and spun What ciphers risen from prophetic script, What marathons new-set between the stars! The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches Already knows the closer clasp of Mars,— New latitudes, unknotting, soon give place To what fierce schedules, rife of doom apace!
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# d670cb2d0ae45b442fd122631e8da3db
Behold the dragon's covey—amphibian, ubiquitous To hedge the seaboard, wrap the headland, ride The blue's cloud-templed districts unto ether... While Iliads glimmer through eyes raised in pride Hell's belt springs wider into heaven's plumed side. O bright circumferences, heights employed to fly War's fiery kennel masked in downy offings,— This tournament of space, the threshed and chiselled height, Is baited by marauding circles, bludgeon flail Of rancorous grenades whose screaming petals carve us Wounds that we wrap with theorems sharp as hail!
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 5e4891b4b0f80a4745b21a55cb92628a
Wheeled swiftly, wings emerge from larval-silver hangars. Taut motors surge, space-gnawing, into flight; Through sparkling visibility, outspread, unsleeping, Wings clip the last peripheries of light... Tellurian wind-sleuths on dawn patrol, Each plane a hurtling javelin of winged ordnance, Bristle the heights above a screeching gale to hover; Surely no eye that Sunward Escadrille can cover! There, meaningful, fledged as the Pleiades With razor sheen they zoom each rapid helix! Up-chartered choristers of their own speeding They, cavalcade on escapade, shear Cumulus— Lay siege and hurdle Cirrus down the skies! While Cetus-like, O thou Dirigible, enormous Lounger Of pendulous auroral beaches,—satellited wide By convoy planes, moonferrets that rejoin thee On fleeing balconies as thou dost glide, —Hast splintered space!
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# e41138a8f26ef9df5c99ee036f41f1d2
The stars have grooved our eyes with old persuasions Of love and hatred, birth,—surcease of nations... But who has held the heights more sure than thou, O Walt!—Ascensions of thee hover in me now As thou at junctions elegiac, there, of speed With vast eternity, dost wield the rebound seed! The competent loam, the probable grass,—travail Of tides awash the pedestal of Everest, fail Not less than thou in pure impulse inbred To answer deepest soundings! O, upward from the dead Thou bringest tally, and a pact, new bound, Of living brotherhood!
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 1cdc6ea9a1ec3aafe1b6e6474e0d0ba8
Cowslip and shad-blow, flaked like tethered foam Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring When first I read thy lines, rife as the loam Of prairies, yet like breakers cliffward leaping! O, early following thee, I searched the hill Blue-writ and odor-firm with violets, 'til With June the mountain laurel broke through green And filled the forest with what clustrous sheen! Potomac lilies, — then the Pontiac rose, And Klondike edelweiss of occult snows! White banks of moonlight came descending valleys— How speechful on oak-vizored palisades, As vibrantly I following down Sequoia alleys Heard thunder's eloquence through green arcades Set trumpets breathing in each clump and grass tuft—'til Gold autumn, captured, crowned the trembling hill!
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# a60bb20b6f200d05cff6015d86bc929c
Panis Angelicus! Eyes tranquil with the blaze Of love's own diametric gaze, of love's amaze! Not greatest, thou,—not first, nor last,—but near And onward yielding past my utmost year. Familiar, thou, as mendicants in public places; Evasive—too—as dayspring's spreading arc to trace is:— Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel; And it was thou who on the boldest heel Stood up and flung the span on even wing Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing!
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# c02f7f808ac7440d5c1ea23f6fe76fe8
Years of the Modern! Propulsions toward what capes? But thou, Panis Angelicus, hast thou not seen And passed that Barrier that none escapes— But knows it leastwise as death-strife?—O, something green, Beyond all sesames of science was thy choice Wherewith to bind us throbbing with one voice, New integers of Roman, Viking, Celt— Thou, Vedic Caesar, to the greensward knelt!
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 58cf459dd941c90022206a49d85fe30d
And now, as launched in abysmal cupolas of space, Toward endless terminals, Easters of speeding light— Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace On clarion cylinders pass out of sight To course that span of consciousness thou'st named The Open Road—thy vision is reclaimed! What heritage thou'st signalled to our hands!
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 7d7e05de1ef97e36517bc06c6e6b1fa9
The seas all crossed, weathered the capes, the voyage done... —WALT WHITMAN
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 5bec079f23c70e337dd47b83531a0f0b
Imponderable the dinosaur sinks slow, the mammoth saurian ghoul, the eastern Cape..
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 6e640c7916049bc4e71dbddf0ab8bd89
While rises in the west the coastwise range, slowly the hushed land— Combustion at the astral core—the dorsal change Of energy—convulsive shift of sand... But we, who round the capes, the promontories Where strange tongues vary messages of surf Below grey citadels, repeating to the stars The ancient names—return home to our own Hearths, there to eat an apple and recall The songs that gypsies dealt us at Marseille Or how the priests walked—slowly through Bombay— Or to read you, Walt,—knowing us in thrall
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 84db16324b2fe99f7346dccf93d403a0
Low, shadowed of the Cape, Regard the moving turrets! From grey decks See scouting griffons rise through gaseous crepe Hung low... until a conch of thunder answers Cloud-belfries, banging, while searchlights, like fencers, Slit the sky's pancreas of foaming anthracite Toward thee, O Corsair of the typhoon,—pilot, hear! Thine eyes bicarbonated white by speed, O Skygak, see How from thy path above the levin's lance Thou sowest doom thou hast nor time nor chance To reckon—as thy stilly eyes partake What alcohol of space...! Remember, Falcon-Ace, Thou hast there in thy wrist a Sanskrit charge To conjugate infinity's dim marge— Anew...!
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 5b7f2a0d64f652037adf5b740d9d9559
But first, here at this height receive The benediction of the shell's deep, sure reprieve! Lead-perforated fuselage, escutcheoned wings Lift agonized quittance, tilting from the invisible brink Now eagle-bright, now quarry-hid, twist- -ing, sink with Enormous repercussive list- -ings down Giddily spiralled gauntlets, upturned, unlooping In guerrilla sleights, trapped in combustion gyr- Ing, dance the curdled depth down whizzing Zodiacs, dashed (now nearing fast the Cape!) down gravitation's vortex into crashed ...dispersion...into mashed and shapeless débris.... By Hatteras bunched the beached heap of high bravery!
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# d5fe0f6b10a46acd46e95107421926fd
Thou, there beyond— Glacial sierras and the flight of ravens, Hermetically past condor zones, through zenith havens Past where the albatross has offered up His last wing-pulse, and downcast as a cup That's drained, is shivered back to earth—thy wand Has beat a song, O Walt,—there and beyond! And this, thine other hand, upon my heart Is plummet ushered of those tears that start What memories of vigils, bloody, by that Cape,— Ghoul-mound of man's perversity at balk And fraternal massacre! Thou, pallid there as chalk, Hast kept of wounds, O Mourner, all that sum That then from Appomattox stretched to Somme!
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 0b4a8d5df5782edd630c31ac9f1dc772
And see! the rainbow's arch—how shimmeringly stands Above the Cape's ghoul-mound, O joyous seer! Recorders ages hence, yes, they shall hear In their own veins uncancelled thy sure tread And read thee by the aureole 'round thy head Of pasture-shine, Panis Angelicus! Yes, Walt, Afoot again, and onward without halt,— Not soon, nor suddenly,—No, never to let go My hand in yours, Walt Whitman— so—
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 623dcdfc1a7a972f994311eab466ee74
The Bridge: IV Cape Hatteras# 088c41f2531ae6c4f91a392b7c10ac00