680
PARTISAN REVIEW
voyage of Columbus, a journey yielding knowledge of a new world,
is made to stand in
The Bridge
as type or pattern of a search under–
taken by Crane's protagonist, a search for the full meaning of the
master image of the poem, the symbolic Bridge. In pursuit of that
essential knowledge, past and present are to be caught up into one
integration and transmuted in an insight definitive of a worthy Amer–
ican destiny-a new world.
The Columbian voyage is a symbol well adapted to the expres–
sion of Crane's conscious intention, conquest of fresh meaning. The
Bridge, the Span which by figurative extension unites the disparate
parts of the physical continent and unifies the spiritual continent of
men, is
also
a ship, means of passage and preservation amid the chaos
of the waters. It is like that ship on whose ocean-spanning deck
Columbus stands meditating "between two worlds," which
~e
to be
joined by
his
voyage:
For here between two worlds, another, harsh,
This third, of water, tests the word.
...
Columbus found his new world, and by completing his voyage he
opened the way to a new continent. Crane aspired to do likewise:
penetrating into the unknown, to discover a new Cathay.
But he did not clearly see
all
that was involved in the way he
had chosen. Or it
is
as if he had seen and could not face the truth,
that the voyage which leads to his goal is a dark encounter with
chaotic waters, a night passage, into disorder and doubt, the "eyes /
Starved wide on blackened tides. . . . " That truth appears in the
poem, but so veiled and distorted that it is impossible to believe that
Crane understood his own expression of it. Again and again the
protagonist
is
drawn to the water. But the black sea is too forbidding.
Living, he will not dive into the sea. When as voyager he stands on a
benighted deck, only twice and very briefly, in "Southern Cross" and
"Atlantis," his eyes cling to the wake.
The encounter with dark waters, either in a night voyage or
a dive into unknown depths, is a familiar symbol in psycho-analytical
literature. It is often thought of as a bath of renewal, because it rep–
resents the first stage of an experience in which refreshment and
readjustment are attained through subordinating to the psychic life
as a whole the fixed, strictly determined, self-perpetuating elements of
consciousness. The voyage or the dive symbolizes a surrender of con-
