BRIDGE INTO THE SEA
683
to
his
inversion. In "Voyages, II" death and desire are paired, and
the poem ends with the implication that attainment comes only with
death, "in the vortex of our grave." Yet if we may venture the Freu–
dian speculation that fear of incest and the vengeful father repelled
Crane from the sea, we need not reduce our explanation to that
hypothesis. Certainly I would avoid the absurdity of explaining
The
Bridge
as
a poetic amplification of the phantasies of incest and cas–
tration. However determined, Crane's failure to develop his under–
standing of the sea and to submit his concept of the Bridge to the
revisions which would have been forced by completed understanding,
seems to me to account for the major imperfections of
The Bridge
and for the swift disintegration of the man.
Because he could not endure the descent into chaos, Crane mis–
represented the voyage as a wholly conscious adventure. In "Indiana"
a young man goes to sea, apparently to return unchanged, bringing
nothing new. In "Atlantis" the poet envisaging the Bridge
,as
ship,
harp, altar, looks upward in worship and aspiration, and at the end,
pathetically enquiring "Is it Cathay?" he remains "floating" becalmed
on the terror and temptation of the sea to which he has never wholly
committed himself. In "Cape Hatteras" ambivalent engines symbolic
of our mechanical achievement aTe envisaged as "launched" like ships
upon the spiritual way of freedom and love defined by Whitman:
they "pass out of sight / To course that span of consciousness thou'st
named / The Open Road- "
Apart from Crane's assertions, there
is
nothing to confirm the
notion that the voyage of machinery into blank space is related in
any way either to Whitman's ideal of brotherhood or to that detached
and serene acceptance of experience, including "the delicious nearby
freedom of death," which is the spirit of the "Open Road." Hurtled
into the false sea of space, the "vast engines" enter that inane toward
which the whole conscious aspiration of the poem is lifted, a sphere
of freedom which seems nearly illimitable only because it is virtually
empty.
A sounder insight into the meaning of the voyage
in
air
is
given
earlier in "Cape Hatteras." There the conquest of space by the ma–
chine
is
pictured
as
a triumph of the established world symbolized
particularly by the powerful image of the "Cetus-like ... Dirigible
... satellited wide / By convoy planes," those "moonferrets" which
