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

Virginia

virginia Orain at seven1 Pay-check at eleven2 — Keep smiling the boss away,3 Mary (what are you going to do?) Gone seven—gone eleven, 5 And I’m still waiting for you— O blue-eyed Mary with the claret scarf,4 Saturday Mary, mine5 ! It’s high carillon From the popcorn bells!6 10 virginia: The title alludes to Queen Elizabeth I, the ‘‘Virgin Queen,’’ for whom Virginia was named, and to Pocahontas, the chieftain’s daughter born in the virgin territory that would become Virginia. The utopian (or half utopian) space of this poem, however, is urban and Bohemian: Lower Manhattan’s Prince Street, in Soho, and Bleecker Street, which in Greenwich Village runs parallel to Prince. Both streets end at the Bowery, the heading of the drunken sailor in ‘‘Cutty Sark.’’ 1. The regenerative rain of ‘‘Virginia’’ recapitulates and renders less equivocal the longawaited rain in the closing section, ‘‘What the Thunder Said,’’ of Eliot’s The Waste Land; the sound of carillon bells in Crane, referred to below, replaces Eliot’s rumble of ‘‘dry sterile thunder without rain.’’ 2. ‘‘Seven’’ and ‘‘eleven’’ refer both to the principal dice throws in craps and to the halfday working hours that the poem’s Mary has on Saturdays. As the poem suggests in its final lines, ‘‘Mary’’ is an office worker in the Woolworth Building on Lower Broadway, the ‘‘high tower’’ beneath which the speaker of the poem stands in the classic posture of the wooer who sings to his mistress as she stands on a balcony. 3. True to her name, Mary fends off her boss’s persistent sexual advances. Her behavior makes her the antithesis of the typist ‘‘home at teatime’’ in Eliot’s The Waste Land (‘‘A Game of Chess’’), who apathetically allows herself to be used sexually by a ‘‘young man carbuncular ’’ because she is ‘‘bored and tired.’’ 4. Mary’s eyes have the Virgin’s traditional color, and her claret scarf modestly sublimates the ruby sheen (and ‘‘scarlet’’ associations) of the dancer in ‘‘National Winter Garden.’’ 5. The rhythm here and throughout suggests that of popular song, which the poem mimics or parodies; Susan Jenkins Brown suggests a specific source, ‘‘What Do You Do Sunday, Mary?’’ (or simply ‘‘Mary,’’ lyrics by Irving Caesar, music by Stephen Jones) from the 1923 musical Poppy. The lyrics include the lines: ‘‘It’s only Saturday that you can be found;/What do you do Mary, All week ’round?’’ Crane’s echo of the question adapts it to the poem’s evocation of a once-weekly ‘‘sabbatical’’ from long hours of work for low wages. The play, incidentally, starred W. C. Fields, to whom it gave the famous line ‘‘Never give a sucker an even break!’’ 6. The bells on the cart of a street vendor selling popcorn suggest the more elevated sound of a carillon: a series of bells set in a tower, played either by a keyboard or by a mechanism resembling a piano roll. The image of the carillon both recalls the tower of Hero and Leander alluded to in the epigraph of ‘‘Three Songs’’ and anticipates the tower invoked at the end of 97 Pigeons by the million— And Spring in Prince Street Where green figs gleam By oyster shells!7 O Mary, leaning from the high wheat tower,8 15 Let down your golden hair!9 High in the noon of May On the cornices of daffodils The slender violets stray,10 ‘‘Virginia’’; the sound of a mechanical instrument, although idyllic here, also echoes the more ominous pianola in ‘‘Cutty Sark.’’ 7. Crane’s gleaming Prince Street idyll reverses the dank cityscape of Eliot’s ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’’: ‘‘The muttering retreats/Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells’’ (ll. 5–7). The figs and oysters for sale on Prince Street suggest the abundance made briefly available by the ‘‘paycheck at eleven’’ and the freedom (however transient) of the weekend; both foodstuffs were thought to have aphrodisiac powers. In the Song of Solomon, green figs represent the awakening of love: ‘‘The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away’’ (2:13). The ‘‘millions of pigeons’’ may similarly suggest the modern urban version of turtle doves, a traditional symbol of true love that, along with other images central to ‘‘Virginia,’’ appears in the...