Hart Crane's 'The Bridge': An Annotated Edition

The Harbor Dawn

the harbor dawn Insistently through sleep—a tide of voices—  years and They meet you listening midway in your dream, more . . . or is The long, tired sounds, fog-insulated noises:1 it from the Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails,2 soundless shore Far strum of fog horns . . . signals dispersed in veils. of sleep that time And then a truck will lumber past the wharves As winch engines begin throbbing on some deck; Or a drunken stevedore’s howl and thud below Comes echoing alley-upward through dim snow. And if they take your sleep away sometimes 10 They give it back again.3 Soft sleeves of sound the harbor dawn: The title may allude to Waldo Frank’s proclamation of an ‘‘American Dawn,’’ an emerging modern aesthetic connected with a new awareness of the American land. 1. The image of fog frames the poem; it may echo any number of similar images in Eliot, especially that of the ‘‘Unreal City / Under the brown fog of a winter noon’’ in ‘‘The Fire Sermon’’ from The Waste Land (‘‘The Harbor Dawn’’ is also set in winter). An even more likely resonance is with Carl Sandburg’s once-famous poem ‘‘Fog,’’ published in 1916: The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. 2. Surplices are vestments used in Catholic ritual: loose-fitting white ecclesiastical gowns with wide sleeves, draped over a cassock. They are worn by the choir (here the ‘‘tide of voices’’ shrouded by the white fog), by those in processionals, and by lower clergy administering the sacraments. The gong suggests Eastern religious ritual, in keeping with the theme of Cathay introduced in ‘‘Ave Maria’’; Crane thus invokes, but also reverses (for this is a love poem), Eliot’s avowed ‘‘collocation of . . . two representatives of eastern and western asceticism ’’ (the Buddha and St. Augustine) in ‘‘The Fire Sermon.’’ 3. Crane wrote to his mother on February 10, 1925: ‘‘I haven’t had 6 hours of solid sleep for three nights, what with the bedlam of bells, grunts, whistles, screams and groans of all the river and harbor buoys, which have kept up an incessant grinding program as noisome as the midnight passing into new year. Just like the mouth of hell, not being able to see six feet from the window and yet hearing all the weird jargon constantly.’’ An earlier letter (November 16, 1924) supplies the contrary: ‘‘All night long there were distant tinklings, buoy bells and siren warnings from river craft. It was like wakening into a dream-land in the early dawn—one wondered where one was with only a milky light in the window and that vague music from a hidden world.’’ The imagery of music heard at a distance found its way into ‘‘The Harbor Dawn,’’ where it anticipates the images of cosmic harmony in the (already written) concluding poem, ‘‘Atlantis.’’ 21 Attend the darkling harbor, the pillowed bay; Somewhere out there in blankness steam Spills into steam, and wanders, washed away —Flurried by keen fifings, eddied Among distant chiming buoys—adrift. The sky, Cool feathery fold, suspends, distills This wavering slumber . . . Slowly— Immemorially the window, the half-covered chair Ask nothing but this sheath of pallid air. 20 And you beside me,4 blessed now while sirens recalls you to Sing to us, stealthily weave us into day—5 your love, Serenely now, before day claims our eyes6 there in a 4. The beloved, as the marginal gloss explains, is an incarnation of Pocahontas, whose body (regardless of who incarnates it, and regardless of whether Crane is personally thinking of a man or a woman here) is coextensive with the American continent, shortly to be traversed in ‘‘The River’’ and ‘‘The Dance.’’ 5. The sirens occupy at least three levels of meaning. At the most literal, they represent the drifting sounds of foghorns and other ‘‘fog-insulated noises’’ that accompany the poet in and out of sleep. Figuratively, these sounds suggest the sirens of Homer’s Odyssey: creatures with the heads of women and the bodies of birds who lured sailors to shipwreck and death with their enchanting songs—always heard at a distance. Odysseus has himself bound to the mast of his ship in order to hear the sirens’ song without yielding to their lure. Crane invokes the Homeric sirens with a characteristic reversal; the sirens of ‘‘The Harbor Dawn’’ are the benign messengers of a ‘‘hidden world’’ (see n. 3...