Lead me past logic and beyond the graceful carp of wit.
And:
What if we falter sometimes in our faith?
The epigraph for “Cape Hatteras” is from Whitman’s “Passage to India” (which contains the parenthetical triplet, harking back to “Ave Maria,” “Ah Genoese, thy dream! thy dream! / Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave / The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream”). As do most of the epigraphs in the poem, it functions as a bridge between the preceding section, in this case “Cutty Sark” (which, with its account of the unsuccessful pick-up, is the true center of unspoken homosexual longing, the yearning for communication, in The Bridge), and the succeeding, here “Cape Hatteras” itself. With one line fore and three lines aft restored (lines, critic Robert Martin first pointed out, Crane probably expected the sagacious reader to be able to supply for himself), here is the passage from which the epigraph is actually taken:
It’s arguable that the elided homosexual (and incestuous) resolution of the epigraphic passage confirms the homosexual subtext of the previous section, “Cutty Sark,” as it makes a bridge between “Cutty Sark” and “Cape Hatteras.”
The “Sanskrit charge” in the Falcon Ace’s wrist (again in “Cape Hatteras”), critic L. S. Dembo had opined, is another reference to the Absolute, via the passage following the epigraphic lines in Whitman’s poem:
Note the development of “Cape Hatteras” from Crane’s initial narrative outline to the poem as written:
In Crane’s poem as outlined, it’s a dying southern soldier who calls to Whitman for aid and absolution. The poem is conceived as a narrated dialogue between them. At the end, deliriously the soldier calls out to the departed Whitman…
In Crane’s poem as realized, it’s a very pensive poet (who has, yes, lived through the Great War; there is reference to the Somme — as Whitman lived through the Civil War — and Appomattox), who calls to Whitman. And instead of a death-bed dialogue, the poem is now the poet’s reflective monologue — with only the plane crashes at its center providing a specific thanatopsis. At its end, however, deliriously, the poet calls to Whitman…
“[T]he eloquence of the dying man… is the substance of the dialogue,” Crane wrote in his outline: in the monologue as written, Crane has expanded that “substance” into the entire poem. Its ironies are still in place — or even further recomplicated: the reason that the yearned- for cleaving of hands cannot ultimately take place at the end of the poem as we have it is because Whitman, rather than the soldier, is dead. What remains of Whitman is the eloquence his language and vision have given to the poet/narrator.
In 1923 Crane had read and been impressed by Nation editor Oswald Garrison Villard’s recent biography of John Brown. And, in the outline, under the title “Calgary Express,” he wrote:
The “scene” is a pullman sleeper, Chicago to Calgary. The main theme is the story of John Brown, which predominates over the interwoven “personal, biographical details” as it runs through the mind of a Negro porter, shining shoes and humming to himself. In a way it takes in the whole racial history of the Negro in America. The form will be highly original, and I shall use dialect. I hope to achieve a word-rhythm of pure jazz movement which will suggest not only the dance of the Negro but also the speed-dance of the engine over the rails.
And from the time of the briefer outline for “Cape Hatteras” he left this interesting sketch for “Ave Maria,” The Bridges opening section:
Columbus’ will — knowledge
Isabella’s will — Christ
Fernando’s will — gold
— 3 ships
— 2 destroyed
1 remaining will, Columbus
Over the next year when the bulk of the poems comprising The Bridge were written, Crane veered from, expanded on, broke, crossed, bridged, and abridged much of this template. A year later, in the early months of 1927, he sent Yvor Winters another, typewritten outline of the poem, this one in ten parts:
Projected Plan of the Poem
# Dedication — to Brooklyn Bridge
# 1—Ave Maria
2—Powhatan’s Daughter
# (1) The Harbor Dawn
# (2) Van Winkle
(3) The River
# (4) The Dance
(5) Indiana
3—Cape Hatteras
# 4—Cutty Sark
# 5—The Mango Tree
# 6—Three Songs
7—The Calgary Express
8—1920 Whistles
# 9—The Tunnel
# 10—Atlantis
Beside “The Mango Tree” Crane jotted a note to Winters by hand: “—may not use this” and, beside “1920 Whistles”: “—ditto.” Crane’s final handwritten comment across the page’s bottom:
Those marked # are completed.
“The Mango Tree” prose-poem was, yes, dropped. (That he was planning to mix prose-poetry in with his poetic series is the first suggestion, however faint, that at one point or another Crane might have had No-valis in mind.) “1920 Whistles” never became a separate poem. And eight stanzas of what he’d done on “The Calgary Express” Crane now appended to the closing section of “The River”—and abandoned the railroad poem. (Today it looks like rather astute poetic tact. Clearly Crane felt that his American poem should contain “the whole racial history of the Negro in America” but, as clearly, he felt he was not the one to write it.) Still, from the earlier outline, I. Columbus, II. Pok- ahantus, IV. Subway, and V. The Bridge are what we have today as I Ave Maria, II Powhatan’s Daughter, VII The Tunnel, and VIII Atlantis, so that the initial template is highly informative about what Crane ultimately and actually decided on.
The order of composition — which reveals its own internal logic — is “Atlantis,” “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge,” “Ave Maria,” “Cutty Sark,” “Van Winkle,” “The Tunnel,” “Harbor Dawn,” “Southern Cross,” “National Winter Garden,” and “Virginia.” After that, things become a bit murky. From then on the probable order is: “The Dance,” “The River,” “Calgary Express” (abandoned and cannibalized for “The Dance”), “Quaker Hill,” “Cape Hatteras.”
At the end of 1927, Stephen Vincent Benét — younger brother of critic William Rose Benét (who’d been notably hostile to Crane’s first, 1926 volume, White Buildings) — published his book-length poem, John Brown’s Body; over the next year it became a major, even enduring, middle-brow success. In it Whitman is a minor figure and John Brown a major presence. Though hardly any critic mentions it, surely Benét’s poem was a good reason for Crane to have dropped the John Brown narrative, if it was not simply a confirmation of the rightness of his earlier tendency to abandon the heavily foregrounded narratives he had once planned for the parts of The Bridge concerning Brown and Whitman.