Though we have already cited the Emerson passage that prompted Crane, sometime in 1926 or ’27, to change the title of his final (if first written) section of The Bridge from “Finale” to “Atlantis,” we are still left with a problem: what is the phenomenal effect of the new title of the poem’s closing section on the reader? What — or better, how — does it signify?
The problem of poetic sources (at whose rim we now totter) makes a vertiginous whirlpool directly beneath all serious attempts at poetic elucidation, now supporting them, now overturning them. For a most arbitrarily chosen example, take Gonzolo’s famous utopian expostulation in Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest (II, i., 148–173; the play is usually dated in its writing as just before its 1611 performance), on how he would run an ideal commonwealth set up on his isolate island:
Once we’ve ransacked our Elizabethan glossaries to ascertain that “contraries” here means “contrary to what is commonly expected,” that “traffic” means trade, that “service” means servants, “succession” inheritance, “tilth” tillage, “bourn” boundary, “engine” weapon, and “foison” abundance, we turn to Michel de Montaigne’s (1533–1593) essay, “Of the Cannibals,” in which Montaigne praises the American Indian nations for their savage innocence — an essay widely read in Elizabethan England — to discover (after a quote from Plato: “‘All things,’ saith Plato, ‘are produced by nature, by fortune, or by art. The greatest and fairest by one or other of the first two, the least and imperfect by the last.’”) the following passage (in John Florio’s 1603 translation) on an imagined ideal nation, suggested by the far-off lands of the American Indians:
It is a nation, I would answer Plato, that hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic superiority; no use of service, of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupations but idle; no respect of kindred but common, no apparel but natural, no manuring of land, no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon, were never heard amongst them. How dissonant would he [Plato] find this imaginary commonwealth from this perfection?
It is not just the ideas — which here and there, in fact, differ — that seem to have been ceded from Montaigne to the bard; rather it is impossible to imagine Shakespeare’s passage written without a copy of Montaigne to hand, if not underscored on the page then loosely in memory.
But even as we declare the above example arbitrary vis-à-vis Crane, the careful reader will remember that, at the close of “Cutty Sark,” among the great boats that Crane/the poet sees from the Bridge, their names in traditional italics, with all their suggestions of travel, the last one we find is, with a question mark, concluding the section, “Ariel?”—named after the airy sprite Shakespeare gives us in that same play, first as an androgynous fey, then (after line 316 of the play’s second scene), on next entrance, as a “water nymph” for the play’s remainder.
There is as little question that Crane’s interrogative “Ariel?” has its source in Shakespeare as there is that Shakespeare’s “metal, corn, or wine” (not to mention traffic, magistrate, letters, service, or commonwealth itself) has its source in Montaigne’s (via Florio’s) “wine, corn, or metal.”
But what about the utopian concerns that Shakespeare (at least for the length of Gonzalo’s speech) and Montaigne share? Crane’s use of Atlantis, of Cathay, within the American tradition, leans toward similar concern. Is the singular question of the single shared term “Ariel?” enough on which to ground an intertextual bridge between an Elizabethan England and a contemporaneous France and Crane’s vision in the American twenties? If so, what is its status? Historically, the “commonwealth” on which Montaigne literarily — and Shakespeare metaphorically — grounded a utopian vision is the same one that Strachy’s journals, quoted in William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain, presents: the journals from which Crane took (via Elizabeth Bowen’s review of Williams’s book) his epigraph for “Powhatan’s Daughter.” Here, perched on the most tenuous intertextual filaments, we are gazing down directly into the very maelstrom we began with, whose chaos casts its spume obscuring intention and origin, conscious choice and writerly history, source and filiation, where the signifieds accessible to the individual poet become hopelessly confounded with and blurred by the signifieds at large in what is called “culture,” all of them a-slip beneath the rhetorical storm, even as all greater poetic possibilities must rise over such turbulence to produce an effect of order, and in the name of such order soar above it.
Atlantis is traditionally the name for an island, or frequently a city, which had reached a pinnacle both of military might and of culture; it was swallowed up by the sea over a cataclysmic day and night’s tempest of torrential rains and earthquakes.
But, in The Bridge, after we read Crane’s title — “Atlantis”—we find, following it, not a description of an island city (however utopian or no), but, rather, a glorious evocation of the Brooklyn Bridge drenched by the moonlight. As such, then, the title does not caption the poem in the usual way of titles; the relation is rather, perhaps, sequential, suggesting another of Crane’s indirect mentions: first Atlantis, then the topic of the poem — the bridge, leading perhaps from, or to, that city. But is there anything else we can say about the still somewhat mysterious title, as it functions in the poem?
To answer this, we undertake what will surely seem our most eccentric digression, bridging centuries and seas and poetic history, though we hope to move only over fairly reasonable textual bridges…
Almost certainly (in a comparatively late decision), Crane took the title for The Bridge’s introductory section — “Proem”—from the poetic introduction of James Thomson’s (1834–1882) The City of Dreadful Night (1874). Certainly it’s the most likely, if not the only, place for him to have encountered the archaic word. (He might well have called the opening “Invocation,” “Prologue,” or any number of other possible titles; as late as ’27, he was calling it “Dedication.”) Thomson’s “Proem” contains the lines: