Anthony22 / Wikimedia Commons

• At Melville’s Tomb
• Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge 
• The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath 
• An embassy. Their numbers as he watched, 
• Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

• And wrecks passed without sound of bells, 
• The calyx of death’s bounty giving back 
• A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph, 
• The portent wound in corridors of shells.

• Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil, 
• Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled, 
• Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars; 
• And silent answers crept across the stars.

• Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive 
• No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps 
• Monody shall not wake the mariner. 
• This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

• Repose of Rivers
• The willows carried a slow sound, 
• A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead. 
• I could never remember 
• That seething, steady leveling of the marshes 
• Till age had brought me to the sea.

• Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves 
• Where cypresses shared the noon’s 
• Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost. 
• And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams 
• Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them 
• Asunder ...

• How much I would have bartered! the black gorge 
• And all the singular nestings in the hills 
• Where beavers learn stitch and tooth. 
• The pond I entered once and quickly fled— 
• I remember now its singing willow rim.

• And finally, in that memory all things nurse; 
• After the city that I finally passed 
• With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts 
• The monsoon cut across the delta 
• At gulf gates ... There, beyond the dykes

• I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer,
• And willows could not hold more steady sound.

Hart Crane

Harold Hart Crane (1899-1932) was an early 20th-century American poet of the second generation after T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound had reshaped the poetic landscape with the birth of the Modernist movement in literature. His poetry is marked by a high style and often obscure yet beautiful phrasings. Like Eliot, Crane sought to capture the spirit of the modern world, a task he most ambitiously realized in his long poem about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, The Bridge. Plagued by alcoholism and frustrated by his homosexuality, Crane disappeared on a ship sailing the Atlantic Ocean; it is presumed he committed suicide.