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PARTISAN REVIEW
called on to "hold thy floating singer late." This is the cosmic flower,
symbol of psychic wholeness, the self-possession of the soul. How shall
it be attained? Not by an excursion into open space, in boundless
aspiration, nor by regression into the past, though the journey lead
beyond personal memory into the legendary simplicities of the mind.
Since the flower lies beneath the sea, it is to be attained only by de–
scent into the waters. But for reasons already explained that descent
was impossible to Crane. At the conclusion of
The Bridge,
having ap–
proached the sea many times but never having committed himself to
it, the poet-or his protagonist-remains in ambiguous suspension
floating at the surface of the water.
It is exactly the position defined in "Voyages, II" where the
poet, renouncing every "earthly shore," awaits revelation in a sea
death, in "the vortex of our grave." In
The Bridge
Crane struggled
to bring about a development beyond that position, but he failed in
everything except the confirmation of his fate, the necessity of find–
ing fulfillment in a death by water.
The answer to Crane's final question "Is it Cathay?" is that the
flower is indeed Cathay and that the poet has not attained it. Cathay
lies at the end of a trial by water. The treasure, the flower Atlantis,
must be recovered from the bottom of the sea, by one who is willing
and able to descend to it, braving chaos. Perhaps in his ordeal such
a one would discover the flower to be precisely the feared act of de–
scent, desertion of the ship and dependence upon the unformulated
life of the deeps. And perhaps thereafter he would
be
seen buoyed on
the water, a "floating singer." But there is a great difference between
one who floats but who has never entirely entrusted himself to the
water and one who floats but has given himself to it. The latter has
risen from death. The former is delaying death, and his reprieve is
his defeat.
Crane ceased to write much, his life lost force and meaning.
Apparently not wholeheartedly, he attempted suicide, choosing poison
first. Then at last he found his way: suicide by leaping from the deck
of the
Orizaba,
into the Gulf where he had already drowned so much.
The
Orizaba
became his bridge into the sea. What he could not do
directly and fully as an artist, he did in his symbolic death: he found
his way to the waters. But it was an imperfect attainment.
