Listen to Hart Crane:
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--
The opening stanza from the opening poem of The Bridge, this one called "To Brooklyn Bridge." The sound is extremely precise, compacted, and simultaneously musical. Assonance in "many dawns," echoes of "chill" in "rippling," which is also alliteratively connected with rest. Order is disordered here, and the meanings of words are multiple, if even fully understandable. What are "white rings of tumult"? White rings, of course, are the bird's turnings, but why tumultous? And is the bird the one "building" Liberty, some sort of cumulative collection of the rings as they are shed, or is he as high as the buildings? Or have we switched registers and perspectives completely, so that "the chained bay waters" describes the bridge and the bay, and Liberty is the famous statue visible from the bridge? The capitalization suggests the latter, but it could just as easily be the former.
Now listen to Wallace Stevens, in another poem about a different kind of water and a different kind of maker:
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The singer is "beyond" the reality of the sea, which is called "genius," a word denoting mind or spirit, even though in the very next sentence it is connected by a simile to "a body wholly body," that is, pure material presence void of mind . The sea may be genius, but the singer is more so--she does not sing the sea, we are told later, but is "the maker of the song she sang. / The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea / was merely a place by which she walked to sing." And yet, it is more than this location for aesthetic creativity, since "its mimic motion / Made constant cry." "Mimic" is precisely chosen here, since it carries something of a literal meaning, namely that the seas motion is "reproductive," wave following wave, as if it were imitating itself. But "mimic" also carries with it the sense of "mimetic," perhaps the oldest theory of art, wherein the poet "imitates" the world around her. Stronger connection between the sea and the poetess is the fact that the ocean's mimic motion is making "constant cry," sounds "inhuman" yet "understandable." The veritable ocean seems to have a mind, a genius, even tho we know that it has never been "formed to mind or voice." I don't think it is pushing to hard on the poem to say that Stevens is reversing and doubling the theory of mimesis: it is as if the ocean wants to accompany the singer; it is as if nature is seeking to communicate with the mind that is beyond it. The gesture is not in vain, for somehow it is as if we understand this strange unspoken. This is not "Nature speaking thru the poet" (Romanticism), not "the imitation of nature" (mimesis), not even "the loss of personality to tradition" (Eliot). It is, instead, what others have called the celebration of "artifice"--art does not sing nature, but it makes something other than nature which, in turn, is read back onto it.
Such an artifice/nature relation is at play in "To Brooklyn Bridge." Indeed, Crane could be Stevens's singer. It is easy to misread Stevens's "Oh! Blessed rage for order," "The maker's rage to order words of the sea" in something of a neo-classical/theological mode: the mind arranges an order that already existed in nature but had to be discovered, or it existed in the mind of God and humanity brings that order on to the earth, or that nature is orderly, and man is the pinnicle of natural rage for order by improving upon nature herself. But Stevens is far more slippery than that; these are "ghostly demarcations" we are talking about here, fragile shapings of the oceans words that, as we have seen, are not words. Crane, similarly, doesn't provide a true "order" onto the Bridge itself--instead, the poem becomes an effluvent, artificial, antimimetic creation of language in which the mind takes pleasure. The Bridge becomes an opportunity to semantically dance an order, just as the harbor becomes an opportunity to sing one. Another stanza from Crane, one of my favorites in the poem:
And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,--
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
"[Across] the harbor" can both refer to the location of the bridge from the perspective of a speaker, but also refer to the fact that the bridge crosses the harbor. "Silver-paced," again on a literal level, I take to refer to the metal "pacings" or divisions of the bridge, both in its macro structure of beams and supports and in the micro structure of its guidewires. But "paced" gives Crane the place to imaginatively leap to a logical disconnect: "As though the sun took step of thee." "Pacing" is like walking as well as "division," thus one description of the bridge semantically twists into another one. I can't say for certain what "took step of thee" means (ie, it may be a colloquism I'm not familiar with), but we are warrented to take the obvious meaning of the sun stepped upon the bridge, leaving a brightness which warrented the first description of "silver-paced" but also "left / Some motion ever unspent in thy stride." The movement of the mind is creating a movement in the bridge, which brings us back to "across the harbor," now to be read as "crossing the harbor" and yet "unspent in thy stride." The bridge is moving and not moving--the bridge is "charged" with both light and motion. "Unspent": the buildup of energy, movement without motion, physiological and almost erotic. And the bridge chooses this: "Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!", ie, you can choose to spend that last energy and, because it is unspent, you must be choosing to remain as you are, across the harbor, in this motionless motion. The stanza has moved from the mere brute physicality of the bridge "across the harbor," via light and movement, to the bridge's "freedom" as an agent with, presumably, an aesthetic eye.
A realm of fantastic order, blessed rage.
Posted by pjaussen at April 11, 2007 01:55 PM | TrackBack