[ To Brooklyn Bridge ]- Hart Crane

[goorugi]

I need to analyze this poem for my American Lit. class and write an essay about it. I'm having trouble forming a good thesis. I was thinking of something along the lines of this:

In Hart Crane's "To Brooklyn Bridge," Crane juxtaposes the historical triumph of American aspirations with mankind's everyday struggles in order to powerfully convey the bridge as a unifying symbol of civilization's evolution and hope for the future.

OR

In Hart Crane's "To Brooklyn Bridge," Crane presents the bridge as both an omnipotent structure and as a significant poetic symbol in order to provide a vivid contrast between the triumph of technological aspirations and mankind's limitations of progress.

I know the two are almost exactly the same, just worded differently... Anyways, feedback please? or any other suggestions? Thanks.

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To Brooklyn Bridge
By: 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--

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

....

[goorugi]

anybody???? plzzz???? im really stuck

[morphicresident]

I am currently working on such a project regarding Crane.

I think it is best to approach the Bridge as technological marvel, as well as metaphorical device.

[chasestalling]

that's a lovely poem. i've always thought hart crane america's most underrated poet. i'm pleased this thread was resurrected.

btw, go easy with the symbols when analysing a poem. the literal meaning is always your best bet.

[JBI]

Not with crane - he was a great lover of metaphor - for instance, look at how he compares the bridge to a harp, and other such devices.

[chasestalling]

are we speaking of "to brooklyn bridge"?

because if we are, i can see how brooklyn bridge can be compared to a harp and how poetic that would be, but the literal meaning of the poem is far from making that comparison.

[JBI]

He makes it in the text!


O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--


The poem in itself can be interpreted many ways, as Crane's style is unbelievably complex. Generally, I tend to go with those who interpret it as a response to Walt Whitman's (who Crane worshiped) poem Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. The bridge now has, quite literally, replaced the ferry, and Crane is using it, and the Whitman reference to build the beginning of his long poem.

[chasestalling]

roughly how many stanzas is "to brooklyn bridge"?

i thought it was just the two cited by the thread starter? (gasping)

[chasestalling]

well i checked up on it and i see that its 11 stanzas. yes the bridge is compared to a harp and yes i do feel foolish for my previous remark.

still, other than for an elusive phrase here and there, the poem isn't so ambiguous as to defy a literal reading which is to me far more pertinent than a symbolic one.

[JBI]

It's ambiguous in the sense that I don't think a literal reading can really work - the actual meaning of the poem is evasive, if you do such a reading. It is almost impossible to say what the poem "means" in the sense that we would question what other poems mean. The descriptions are all fine, but one is left with an overwhelming question of where Crane is really going with this. Why is he describing the bridge, and for what reason. That's why I, and other critics seem to go with him summoning Whitman, because in that reading, we can see a direct parallel over setting, and therefore understand that when Whitman says, "I see them face to face", Crane is saying, yes, you see this face to face. You see this view - this is what Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is preluding to. In that sense, we can start to unravel the poem in comparison with the other.

When, for instance, Whitman says

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east; 15
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high;
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide

We can say that he is seeing into the future, that others will experience the Crossing of the River. Crane is also seeing the Crossing of the river, this time by Bridge, as it was built after Whitman, and had replaced the Ferry. What Crane sees, therefore can be taken as a response to what Whitman saw.

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d; 25
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

This passage almost has an answer straight from crane;

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

The feeling of the crossing has somewhat changed - Whitman's vision is obscured by the Bridge, which has destroyed the connection of him to the world - he no longer feels what we feel, as the Ferry is gone. The Bridge carries us over to our day, without the rushing, or swaying of the Ferry. It has "chained [the] bay waters Liberty", and flooded over, which leads us into the modernist vision.

Therefore we can say that Crane, to some extent, is undercutting Whitman - Whitman no longer sees into the future, the Bridge has replaced the Ferry, and what he felt is no longer felt by the crossers. despite what he said before. The emotion of the cross has been replaced by an acceptance, the bridge has replaced everything;


Of course though, the poem is far more complex than that, take for instance, Paul Gilles's reading of the first four lines alone:

The symbolic grandeur of the first four lines is counterbalanced by the world of work depicted in the second stanza, whose literal meaning is that the seagull fades out of sight as quickly as boats pass the harbor, and that the imaginative reveries inspired by the bird must be checked ("filed away") in order to allow the business world to function. But this opposition between a romantic desire to sail to far-off lands and an acquiescence in humdrum clerical duties is also revealed by the tilting between opposites inherent in the stanza’s puns. The clue is sails, for, given the context of figures and files and elevators, it would be more predictable to find commercial "sales" rather than sailing-ships here. Therefore we may see the "inviolate curve" of the Bridge as a merging into the "inviolate curve" of a sales graph, for Bridge and sales graph become equivalent mythic forces which allow a renunciation of the Romantic ego ("forsake our eyes," with a pun turning on "eye" and "I") and which transmute the citizen into an item within the profit-and-loss columns tossed off by this office-clerk, the "page of figures" (page: "a man of humble birth or status"). Similarly, in the fourth line Till puns on "money drawer in a shop or store," which presents us with a Surrealistic image of the New York office-workers being carried up and down the city’s skyscrapers as if on the levers of some gigantic cash-register. Crane’s intricacies extend even further, for drop is "to part with or lose (money)," and "our day" puns on "oday," American slang for "money." Thus one cryptic version of this line would be: "Cash-registers part us from our money." This testifies to the ceaseless orbit of commercialism upon which New York revolves: the workers’ wages are exchanged for goods in shops, the sales of commodities enables businesses to employ clerical workers – pages of figures – who in turn spend their earnings to keep the cycle in motion.

From http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poe...rane/proem.htm

The metaphors are heavy layored, unbelievably complex, and almost completely cryptic.

Also though, you should look on the website at Gilles's reading of the last stanza - it changes the feel of the poem immensely once you read it.

[chasestalling]

gilles' reading is ingenious and i don't doubt the poem is a sort of an antiphonal response to whitman's "crossing brooklyn ferry".

however there is a literal meaning to the poem which i think is being needlessly obscured, a tendency to overlook the quiddity of the words for the sake of an arch symbolism which may or may not be there.

what i know is there is that the bridge evokes a kind of poetic and religious awe in the speaker and it's not hard to imagine why. the bridge was the first of its kind in terms of design and scale. it's purpose is utilitarian, to get people to and fro across new york harbor, but the inspiration to have conceived of such a thing and the will to see it to the end of its construction...that took some doing.