Photo of the Day: Brooklyn Bridge, ‘Sleepless as the River Under Thee’

“O Sleepless as the river under thee,

Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,

Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend

And of the curveship lend a myth to God.”— American poet Hart Crane (1889-1932), “To Brooklyn Bridge,” in The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, edited by Brom Weber (1933)

I took this photo in early October of last year. As you can tell from the short-sleeved shirts of those gathered by the riverside, something like Indian summer was being experienced and enjoyed that day. It was the kind of day that make those lucky enough to be in that area to fall in love with this stretch of New York City.

Quote of the Day (Hart Crane, on Emily Dickinson)

“You who desired so much—in vain to ask—
Yet fed your hunger like an endless task,
Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest—
Achieved that stillness ultimately best.”—Hart Crane, “To Emily Dickinson,” in The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1979)

Part of a sonnet, a tribute by Hart Crane (born on this day in Garrettsville, Ohio) to the Belle of Amherst, these lines evoke the mystery of a life, and represent the ruminations of a fellow poet, whose suicide represents another enigma.

Crane is aiming for something subtle here. The rhythm, the rhyme and especially the dashes bring the reader up short, the way a Dickinson poem does. But the vocabulary is different, the narrator is grave rather than playfully ironic, and the person being addressed is not the reader, as Dickinson did, but the female poet herself, who becomes his muse.

In other words, Crane steals Dickinson’s tricks to find his own voice.

Notice that Crane suggests the circumstances of her life rather than relating them. Her daily chores—tending to her garden, looking after the needs of her parents—are summoned up by “an endless task” and “dignify the labor.”

Like his inspiration, Crane takes a risk with his very first phrase: “You who desired so much.” But what did this famously lifelong spinster desire? Inner freedom? Literary immortality? Love?
Almost immediately sensing the impossibility of answering this question, Crane pulls back: it’s “in vain to ask” what that might be, because of the poet’s reticence.

The quatrain concludes with another ambiguous, one might say Dickinsonian, phrase: “that stillness ultimately best.” Which stillness—the fierce privacy she maintained, for who knows what reason and at what cost, or the peace that comes with death? (As Dickinson put it: “I could not stop for death,/So he kindly stopped for me.”)

The latter possibility is one that must have appeared increasingly sweet to Crane, whose childhood and youth were spent in the company of parents utterly incompatible with each other and whose young manhood was marked by alcoholism and a series of fleeting, mostly homosexual affairs that never really satisfied him. In 1932, he killed himself by leaping from the deck of a ship.

A remark attributed to E.E. Cummings captures Crane in his limits and his promise: "Crane’s mind was no bigger than a pin, but it didn’t matter; he was a born poet."