"To Brooklyn Bridge" by Hart Crane

Hart Crane (1899-1932) was an American poet. Born of an Ohioan family of candy-makers, Crane was drawn to New York City and worked between there as a copywriter and a struggling poet and as a worker in his family's candy factory. The Brooklyn Bridge, a modern marvel across the East River, is the eponym for his magnum opus, "The Bridge." His poetry greeted modernity with an intrigue of marvel; featuring metaphoric juxtaposition of new technology, landscape, power, the urban jungle, homoerotic images, and a sort of remorse over the new triumph of this new glass and steel Olympus now that it is completed. The fifth stanza was particularly prophetic as Crane died in 1932 when he deliberately walked off the edge of a ship in the Gulf of Mexico after winning a Guggenheim fellowship. His poetry was often dense, but I think it captured the conflictions of unrequited love from an exciting new era, the city and the personal sphere, among other themes.

It was reported that the actual Brooklyn Bridge will have a four-year long renovations from 2010 to 2014.

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 . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

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!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

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,--

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

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 . . .

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.

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• Hart Crane
• Brooklyn Bridge
• poetry
• poem
• American poetry
• New York City
• discussion

[mistacramer]

0:56 The actual start of the poem.

[eyan73]

All credit for making this video, but what is with the music man! It has killed the aura of elation and ecstasy I feel when I read this poem... instead deluding us with some semblance of a dank back-alley in downtown New York.

[HerAeolianHarp]

Keep the great American writers coming! I also like Mayakovsky's poem about the Brooklyn Bridge. You may know it, but here's a bit I once posted four years ago on a blog I used to have for my writing: Eager to live I clamber, in pride upon Brooklyn Bridge. As a foolish painter plunges his eye, sharp and loving, into a museum madonna, so I, from the near skies bestrewn with stars, gaze at New York through the Brooklyn Bridge... Excerpt from "Brooklyn Bridge" by Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1925.