684
PARTISAN REVIEW
Crane has called "the dragon's covey"-that is, ill the terms of fam–
iliar symbolism, the children of the Father as enemy. The following
passage details the scouting flight of a plane guided by an ace whose
mission is "to conjugate infinity's dim rage- / Anew ... !" He is
shot down. This successful assault of established power on the pioneer
of new insight pictures exactly the personal defeat of Crane the re–
jected son. There are various suggestions in "Cape Hatteras" that
the sky is a sea, place of adventure and search, but it is a sea dom–
inated by the Whale and in it the choice son of the dragon is destroyed.
. He falls-not into the ocean, but broken to the earth: "beached heap
of high bravery!"
It is a striking fact that the conclusion of "Cape Hatteras," in
which transmutation of the mechanical way of modern life has been
proclaimed but not demonstrated, is followed by a song of agonized
appeal and hopeless longing addressed to the "Woman of the South."
Like the Southern Cross, a constellation lying, for us, as Cathay did
for Crane's Columbus, under the horizon-beneath the sea, she be–
longs to the waters. Approached in a night voyage in which disinte–
gration is represented as begun but not as completed, she is never
found: she and the Southern Cross that watched the night sea are
drowned in light, in the return to full consciousness.
Despite his self-deceptions, Crane could not altogether conceal
the truth. The sea drew him, in horror and fascination. The intensity
and exaltation of "Ave Maria," the splendor of the chant that con–
cludes "The River," indicate that he sensed that his salvation was
the sea. The poetry most false to this insight-"Indiana" and the
conclusion of "Cape Hatteras"-is his weakest.
Crane's passion for the sea was not repressible for long. It gives
his poem an obscure but vital coherence. Most of what has been
baffling in the structure of
The Bridge,
including
~uch
apparent
confusion and discontinuity, is clarified into pattern when understood
as a consequence of the vacillation produced by Crane's central long–
ing and revulsion.
These forces operate, unfortunately, without Crane's full under–
standing. In the mind of the derelict sailor of "Cutty Sark," the
poet
or his protagonist sees "frontiers gleaming," but immediately ques–
tions their existence, envisaging the apparent contrary of "running
sands," an image suggesting the flowing chaos of debris, dead bodies,
