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Tuesday
Baltimore’s Key Bridge catastrophe, brought about when a container ship destroyed a section by colliding with one of the pilings, has me thinking about Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1933). The poet’s ambitious and challenging epic uses the Brooklyn Bridge to symbolize the spirit of the American Dream.
Opened in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge was an astounding achievement, seeming proof of America’s aspirational greatness. This raises the question of whether we can still dream soaring dreams. Even as Joe Biden promises federal aid to restore the Baltimore bridge as soon as possible, the GOP’s “harpies of the shore” (to borrow a phrase from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Old Ironsides”) are threatening to deny funding. Meanwhile, some MAGAts are blaming both Biden and diversity policies for the disaster.
Because “To Brooklyn Bridge,” which functions as a prologue to Crane’s poem, is often obscure, I’ll walk you through it. It begins with the image of a soaring seagull looking down at the bridge, which seems to chain the waters below. The bird appears as a brief apparition to office workers in skyscrapers, perhaps reminding them that we are a nation of dreamers. In fact, this dreaming takes them to movie theaters time and again:
To Brooklyn Bridge (prologue to The Bridge)
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…
As I read these lines, I think of the opening passage from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God:
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Crane, however, has not turned his eyes away in resignation. Rather, he sees the Bridge as a symbol of tangible hope, at least for some. The sun that moves across it, turning it silver, leaves some of its energy with it. The bridge may be stationary and yet it seems to soar freely:
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!
I say “for some” because Crane then mentions a mad man who commits suicide by leaping from its heights. Not all American stories are happy ones and Crane himself in the near future will commit suicide in similar fashion, leaping off the back of a boat. Yet even this instance speaks to the bridge’s mesmerizing power:
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.
This is only a temporary interlude, however. Shining through the bridge’s girders is the sun (“the sky’s acetylene”), casting rip-tooth shadows onto Wall Street. And while the cargo-loading derricks turn under a cloudy sky, the bridge’s cables “breathe the North Atlantic still,” which I’m reading as partaking of and embodying the awesome power of nature. The bridge may be made by humans for commercial purposes, but it channels something greater:
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.
The bridge radiates not only natural force but spiritual mystery (“the heaven of the Jews”). The anonymous masses of New York feel their power as they are lifted up and redeemed by the structure, which the poet comes to see as a great musical instrument. When Crane describes the Brooklyn Bridge as “harp and altar,” I think of the importance that Romantic poets like Percy Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge attached to aeolian harps, which use the wind’s power to create art. Crane sees the bridge’s music attracting prophets, outcasts, and lovers (he himself regarded himself as all three):
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…
At night, as car headlamps outline the bridge with a string of luminescent beads, Crane senses that it is lifting up the night itself in its arms. And then later, after all the city lights have gone out (“the City’s fiery parcels all undone”), he experiences the full shadow of the bridge. His observation that snow is submerging “an iron year” hints, once again, that something about the bridge is redemptive. As prophet, outcast, and lover himself, he is being lifted above his hard and unforgiving iron existence:
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 …
And indeed the bridge—this “immaculate sigh of stars”—is a constant presence. It’s as though, by vaulting sea and looking out towards the western prairies, it connects the high and the low, the sky and the sod. Caught up in the sweep and curve of the cables, the poet feels that God has been given a new myth. We call that myth the American Dream:
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.
I grant that Baltimore’s Key Bridge is nothing like the Brooklyn Bridge, which is an architectural as well as an engineering marvel. Nevertheless, our current challenge begs the question of whether America is still capable of lending a myth to God.
