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

V. Three Songs

v. three songs The one Sestos, the other Abydos hight. —Marlowe epigraph: From Christopher Marlowe’s unfinished epyllion (short epic) Hero and Leander (1593). ‘‘Hight’’ means ‘‘named.’’ Sestos and Abydos were towns on either side of the Hellespont (today’s Dardanelles), separating Hero, immured in a high tower, from her doomed lover. Marlowe’s text combines the motifs of idealized romantic quest and sexually explicit, sometimes bawdy, entertainment; Crane’s ‘‘Three Songs’’ do the same. The image of the tower carries over from the shapes of waves in ‘‘Ave Maria’’ to the ‘‘Cyclopean towers’’ of ‘‘The Harbor Dawn’’ to the Woolworth Building in ‘‘Virginia,’’ the last of the ‘‘Three Songs.’’ ‘‘Three Songs’’ are also loosely indebted to the three songs of the Thames Maidens in part 3, ‘‘The Fire Sermon,’’ of Eliot’s The Waste Land. ...