Harry Potter starts his at Number Four Privet Lane, Little Whinging. In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy starts her journey in rural Kansas.
Why kick off the sequence on such a depressing note? It provides a point of comparison. Disillusioned grown-ups are condemned to drown in sorrow. Children can be content because they are ignorant of life’s harsh realities. The bottom of the sea is cruel.” The implied punch line is downbeat. Only a few easily transgressed taboos separate them from an adult’s knowledge of mortality and sexuality: “there is a line / You must not cross.
Worse, they engage in horseplay that comes dangerously close to foreplay (“frisk,” “fondle”). He sees the children as vulnerable, dwarfed by the titanic natural forces that play about them (“The sun beats lightning on the waves, / The waves fold thunder on the sand”). Instead of sentimentally delighting in the scene of kiddies at play, the jaded speaker perversely adds overtones of warfare and torture (“conquest,” “flay”). Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast. You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,Īnd their fingers crumble fragments of baked weedĪnd in answer to their treble interjectionsĪnd could they hear me I would tell them:īy time and the elements but there is a line It depicts a gang of kids-“Bright striped urchins”-“digging” in the sand and “scattering” bits of dried seaweed as they search for seashells: Above the fresh ruffles of the surfīright striped urchins flay each other with sand. One has to be alert throughout “Voyages” for how Crane’s words are “adly meeting logically,” that is, assembled masterfully so as to suggest disorder.Ĭrane begins the poem sequence with an older, leftover, preachy lyric, originally titled “Poster,” that he had never found satisfying. There’s method, Crane reminds us subtly yet insistently, behind the surface madness. And the final section even rhymes, abcb, a deliberate echo of the ballad tradition. The underlying iambic meter, for example, is a constant reminder of the author’s shaping hand. Just as the craziest moments in comedy from Plautus to Ugly Betty depend on virtuosic scriptwriting, a lot of craft goes into conveying the poem’s air of unruly, rowdy whimsy. Who expects lovers to behave rationally, let alone remember the rules of proper punctuation? He might sometimes slip over the line from bold invention into pure nonsense, his grammar might rupture, and, yes, his diction might veer into weirdness, but more often than not, a reader is swept along by the swells of passion. Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?īy employing such outlandish rhetoric, Crane hopes to focus readers’ attention on what he believes really matters: the fact that true love hits you like a tsunami and overwhelms every objection and reservation. Shall they not stem and close in our own stepsīright staves of flowers and quills today as I The chancel port and portion of our June. Here is a representative sample, taken from Part IV: All fragrance irrefragably, and claimĪnd region that is ours to wreathe again, You get blushes and sighs, rejection and consummation, heaving breasts and Freudian symbols, the whole melodramatic Petrarchan caboodle.
“Voyages” grandly, passionately blazes with traditional love-lyric rhetoric. Second, although Western poets from Theocritus to Whitman had celebrated male-on-male action, American society still wasn’t fully prepared for a gay bard to burn that torch too brightly.Ĭrane responded by lighting a bonfire. You’re up against such greats as Shakespeare and Byron writers in the throes of young love generally churn out verse that sounds greeting-card vapid in comparison. First, it isn’t easy to write a convincing love poem. And not just any poem, but a whole poem sequence, the most ambitious work that he had yet attempted. Like any wordsmith worth a red cent, he started writing a poem about it. In 1923, Hart Crane (1899–1932) met a blond, blue-eyed Danish sailor named Emil Opffer. Exchange overheard in a West Hollywood Safeway