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

Van Winkle

van winkle Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny’s belt,1 Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate:2 Streets spread Listen!3 the miles a hurdy-gurdy grinds—4 past store and Down gold arpeggios mile on mile unwinds.5 factory—sped by sunlight van winkle: The title character is, of course, Rip Van Winkle, of Washington Irving’s famous story of the same name (1819). Van Winkle falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains and wakes up twenty years later; in Crane’s version the nap lasts rather longer, leaving Rip a citizen of the modern metropolis. The poem makes several glancing allusions to details from the story, noted below. Crane may or may not have known that Irving took vacations at a celebrated seaside hotel in Far Rockaway and that he planned to write a biography of Columbus. 1. ‘‘Tunny’’: tuna. The image, like the highway, unites land and sea in a single leaping curve, like the arc of the Bridge in ‘‘To Brooklyn Bridge.’’ Compare the first section of Whitman’s ‘‘Starting from Paumanok’’ (the title refers to the Indian name for Long Island), which begins ‘‘Starting from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born’’ and ends, after a continent -spanning series of images, ‘‘Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.’’ 2. The macadam highway ‘‘bridging’’ the east and west coasts of the United States gives modern material form to the country’s nineteenth-century credo of ‘‘manifest destiny’’—the supposedly inevitable westward expansion joining the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Golden Gate here is not the famous bridge, which was completed in 1937, five years after Crane’s death, but the strait dividing San Francisco Bay from the ocean. It was so named in 1846 by John Charles Fremont in expectation of the inflow of riches from trade with Asia, an origin that links its naming in the poem both to Columbus’s dream of Cathay and to the nineteenthcentury clipper ship trade recalled in ‘‘Cutty Sark.’’ (‘‘Golden Gate’’ is a play on ‘‘Golden Horn,’’ a name for the Bosporus or Hellespont, the Turkish strait alluded to in the epigraph of ‘‘Three Songs.’’) Far Rockaway, at the tip of the Rockaway peninsula on the Long Island shore, not only marks the eastern edge of the country but may also evoke Whitman’s depiction of the ‘‘slapping waves’’ and ‘‘lone singer’’ in a poem whose title Crane’s choice of place name may echo, ‘‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.’’ In his Specimen Days, Whitman notes that ‘‘at Rockaway and far east along the Hamptons, the beach makes right on the island, the sea dashing up without intervention.’’ 3. As Irving’s Rip starts to descend from the Catskill peak where he has taken refuge from work (and his nagging wife), he is mysteriously accosted by ‘‘a voice from a distance, hallooing , ‘Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!’’’ 4. ‘‘Hurdy-gurdy’’: the barrel organ, widely associated with Italian immigrants playing on street corners; it is thus a distant echo of Columbus’s voyage. A similar transposition appears in ‘‘The Tunnel,’’ in the person of the crudely named ‘‘Wop washerwoman.’’ 5. As the marginal gloss indicates, the transcontinental movement of the arpeggios is ‘‘sped by sunlight’’; their gold, like that of the sun, moves across the country from east to west. The unwinding of the miles links both the highway and the sound of the barrel organ to Whitman ’s equally continent-spanning open road; the poem of that name at one point also links the leaping of distance to a musical motion: ‘‘The earth expanding right hand and left hand,/ The picture alive, every part in its best light, / The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is not wanted, / The cheerful voice of the open road’’ (‘‘Song of the Open Road,’’ ll. 39–42). Crane, however, counterpoints Whitman’s future-oriented journey with a movement of both personal and historical memory. 27 Times earlier, when you hurried off to school, and her —It is the same hour though a later day—6 smile . . . You walked with Pizarro in a copybook,7 And Cortes rode up, reining tautly in—8 Firmly as coffee grips the taste,—and away! There was Priscilla’s cheek close in the wind,9 10 And Captain Smith,10 all beard and certainty, And Rip Van Winkle bowing by the way,— ‘‘Is this Sleepy Hollow, friend—?’’ And he—11 Like Memory, she...