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

VII. The Tunnel

vii. the tunnel To Find the Western path Right thro’ the Gates of Wrath. —Blake the tunnel: Crane originally planned to entitle this section ‘‘The Subway’’; many of its symbolic details are features of a typical subway ride from midtown Manhattan to Brooklyn. The transit system in the 1920s was in several respects quite unlike today’s: the train lines (two at the time, later three) were leased by the city to private operators; there were almost as many elevated lines in Manhattan as there were subways; and the train doors had to be operated manually—an inconvenience with consequences that the poem exploits. epigraph: Blake’s ‘‘Morning’’ provides ‘‘The Tunnel’’ with an implicit model: To find the Western path Right thro’ the Gates of Wrath I urge my way. Sweet Mercy leads me on, With soft repentant moan I see the break of day. The War of swords and spears Melted by dewy tears Exhales on high. The Sun is freed from fears And with soft grateful tears Ascends the sky. Like Blake’s, Crane’s text describes a journey toward dawn that begins in the west, although ‘‘The Tunnel’’ ends before the dawn arrives. For Crane, the journey is a descent, as the close of ‘‘Quaker Hill’’ has foretold; the place of ‘‘The Tunnel’’ in The Bridge is like that of the catabasis, the descent to the Underworld, in Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, whose protagonists make the journey down on their way, respectively, to finding the way home and to founding a great city. In a letter to Otto Kahn (March 18, 1926), Crane explains that his modern underworld, identified with the subway system, represents ‘‘the encroachment of machinery on humanity; a kind of purgatory in relation to the open sky.’’ Performances, assortments, résumés– Up Times Square to Columbus Circle1 lights Channel the congresses, nightly sessions,2 Refractions of the thousand theatres, faces– Mysterious kitchens. . . . You shall search them all.3 5 Someday by heart you’ll learn each famous sight And watch the curtain lift in hell’s despite; You’ll find the garden in the third act dead,4 1. Times Square, at the intersection of Seventh Avenue, Broadway, and 42nd Street, was named in 1904 for the then-new building occupied by the New York Times; starting in 1928 the building displayed news headlines (Crane’s ‘‘résumés’’) on a band of electric lights wrapped around its façade near the base. By 1910, Times Square had became the hub of the nation’s premier theater district, housing over forty theaters with brightly illuminated marquees inside a thirteen-block radius; new theaters continued to open throughout the next decade and into the 1920s. Crane is describing the river of lights running north along Broadway —nicknamed the Great White Way as early as 1902 for its extravagant illumination— toward Columbus Circle at the southwest corner of Central Park, by 59th Street. Completed in 1905, Columbus Circle is the point from which official distances to and from New York are measured. A major traffic hub, the circle centers on a pillared statue of Columbus by Gaetano Russo, erected in 1892 as part of the city’s commemoration of the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage. Columbus Circle thus links ‘‘The Tunnel’’ to ‘‘Ave Maria.’’ It may be worth noting, in this connection, that the statue’s column is decorated with reliefs of Columbus’s ships; an angel holding a globe adorns the pedestal. 2. ‘‘Congresses’’ carries a sexual innuendo, as ‘‘nightly sessions’’ probably does also, while referring literally to nightly shows at theaters and clubs. 3. In the context of walking the streets at night, this line probably echoes the recurrent phrase ‘‘known them all,’’ from T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’’ Crane noted the prevalence of an ‘‘Eliot mood’’ on the ‘‘first page’’ of ‘‘The Tunnel’’ (to Yvor Winters, April 29, 1927). 4. The curtain that, when lifted, reveals only a dead garden recalls Shelley: Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there, And it but mimic all we would believe . . . I knew one who had lifted it—he sought, For his lost heart was tender, things to love, But found them not, alas! nor was there aught The world contains, the which he could approve. (ll. 1–3...