IRID&E INTO THE SEA
681
sciousness in a search for the unconscious life. Some such yielding of
the determinate to the indetenninate
is
a necessary step in all inner
development, including that which takes place in invention, in the
creative process. Whether in art or thought, a disordering, or a sus–
pension of order, precedes the attainment of fresh insight. Crane's
impulse toward the waters
is
thus understandable as essentially right
and normal. It
is
part of his human need as a creative individual.
In
his
conscious intention, Crane did not commit his protagonist
to the adventure into darkness. Yet the encounter with the chaos of
the sea
is
the most compelling theme of
The Bridge:
not the con–
sciously accepted theme of order established, but the theme of order
destroyed. It elicits Crane's profoundest excitement and sustains his
greatest poetry. That theme appears most clearly in "The River." The
poem begins with images of "the cultural confusion of the present,"
as Crane himself declared. His own comment on his poem is instruc–
tive: "My tramps are psychological vehicles, also. Their wander–
ings, as you will notice, carry the reader into interior after interior,
all of it funneled by the Mississippi. They are the left-overs of the
pioneers in at least this respect-that abstractly their wanderings
carry the reader through certain experiences roughly parallel to that
of the traders, adventurers, Boone and others. I
think
I have caught
some of the essential spirit of the Great Valley here, and in the process
have approached the primal world of the Indian, which emerges with
a full orchestra in the succeeding 'Dance.' " The tramps lead us across
space and time, into legendary depths. It
is
a descent into the Amer–
ican origins of the poet's imagination. But it
is
something further,
for it goes beyond the legend, goes into the waters of the funnelling
Mississippi, which drags the continent and its creatures into the sea
where all form and substance physical and psychical, the shapes of
things and the memory of things, are dissolved:
The River, spreading, flows-and spends your dream.
W hat are you, lost within this tideless spell?
You are your father's father, and the stream-
Precisely that: lost in the racial stream, you are identified with your
ancestors in the course of a regression toward the depths of the im–
personal psychic life, the sea, which Crane represented as the goal
of the River.
