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

Indiana

indiana The morning glory, climbing the morning long . . . and read Over the lintel on its wiry vine, her in a Closes before the dusk, furls in its song mother’s As I close mine . . .1 farewell gaze. And the bison thunder rends my dreams no more2 As once my womb was torn, my boy, when you Yielded your first cry at the prairie’s door . . . Your father knew Then, though we’d buried him behind us, far 9 Back on the gold trail—then his lost bones stirred. . . . But you who drop the scythe to grasp the oar Knew not, nor heard indiana: According to Crane, this poem was planned as ‘‘the monologue of an Indiana farmer; time, about 1860. He has failed in the gold-rush and is returned to till the soil. His monologue is a farewell to his son, who is leaving for a life on the sea. It is a lyrical summary of the period of conquest, and his wife, the mother who died on the way back from the goldrush , is alluded to in a way which implies her succession to the nature-symbolism of Pocahontas ’’ (to Otto Kahn, September 12, 1927). In the final version, the monologue belongs to the mother, and the father has died on the gold trail before the birth of his son. The gold rush is the largest in American history, the Colorado or Pike’s Peak gold rush of 1858 to 1861. Exemplified by the once-famous phrase ‘‘Pike’s Peak or bust!’’ it drew a massive tide of miners and settlers to the Rocky Mountains. One consequence was that the Indian tribes of northern Colorado found their traditional way of life disintegrating as new trails and settlers encroached on Indian lands and poached their game. A displaced Indian women plays the pivotal role in Crane’s text. 1. John T. Irwin suggests that ‘‘Indiana’’ alludes to a popular song, ‘‘the 1917 ballad ‘Indiana ,’ perhaps better known by its first line as ‘Back Home Again in Indiana,’ with its imagery of nostalgic longing for a rural, childhood home: ‘The new mown hay sends all its fragrance/ From the fields I used to roam,/When I dream about the moonlight on the Wabash,/ Then I long for my Indiana home,’ as if the twentieth-century ballad expressed the feelings of the runaway son grown older.’’ 2. ‘‘Bison thunder’’: the hoof beats, heard or remembered, of the vast herds of bison (‘‘American buffalo’’) that once roamed the American West. The sound recedes as the mother journeys east, but its disappearance also suggests both the decimation of the bison population and the destruction of the Indian way of life that depended on it. Overhunting by both whites and Indians had driven the bison to near extinction by the 1880s; a drought extending from 1845 into the 1860s accelerated the collapse. 53 How we, too, Prodigal, once rode off, too3 — Waved Seminary Hill a gay good-bye . . . We found God lavish there in Colorado But passing sly. The pebbles sang,4 the firecat slunk away5 17 And glistening through the sluggard freshets came In golden syllables loosed from the clay His gleaming name. 3. The parable of the Prodigal Son appears in Luke 15:11–22; Crane’s capitalization of ‘‘Prodigal’’ makes it clear that the word is a vocative addressed to the son, Larry, rather than an adjective modifying ‘‘we, too,’’ although the latter usage persists as an undertone. The Prodigal Son was a young man who left home for a ‘‘far country’’ and squandered his inheritance in riotous living. So famished he craved even pig slops, the Prodigal slunk home, hoping only to be hired as a servant. Instead, he was welcomed by his rejoicing father, who slaughtered the ‘‘fatted calf’’ for a celebratory feast. Crane’s Prodigal inverts the parable: he is forgiven in advance by his mother, but his fate remains uncertain at best: he may, or may not, return (but not to home and mother) as the drunken sailor in the next section of The Bridge, ‘‘Cutty Sark.’’ 4. The singing pebbles are the gleaming nuggets (‘‘syllables’’) of ore separated from the clay by prospectors panning for gold in the freshets of mountain streams. The images recall William Blake’s poem ‘‘The Clod and the Pebble’’: ‘‘Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a heaven in hell’s despair.’’ So sung a little Clod...