File:Hart Crane read by Tennessee Williams, The Broken Tower

Description
The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn

Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell

Of a spent day - to wander the cathedral lawn

From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps

Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway

Antiphonal carillons launched before

The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;

And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave

Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score

Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping

The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!

Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles out leaping-

O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…

And so it was I entered the broken world

To trace the visionary company of love, its voice

An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)

But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored

Of that tribunal monarch of the air

Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word

In wounds pledged once to hope - cleft to despair?

The steep encroachments of my blood left me

No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower

As flings the question true?) -or is it she

Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-

And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes

My veins recall and add, revived and sure

The angelus of wars my chest evokes:

What I hold healed, original now, and pure…

And builds, within, a tower that is not stone

(Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip

Of pebbles, - visible wings of silence sown

In azure circles, widening as they dip

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye

That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…

The commodious, tall decorum of that sky

Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

The Broken Tower, among the last poems Hart Crane wrote, was written shortly before he took a boat from Mexico to Cuba. It's agreed this mysterious melodious poem (reminding me of Keats) is about a woman and love too (or looking for it or looking and not finding it trying to make it out of something new) (through destruction perhaps). The woman, his first heterosexual affair after a lifetime of homosexual ones, was with him on the ship, but had burned her hand so badly when a book of matches flamed while lighting a cigarette, she wasn't in the mood when Hart came to her wanting some consolation after being beaten up by a sailor who'd spurned his advances. "Goodbye, everybody," Hart said before he jumped off the ship into the blue Caribbean. Those who didn't like him (and there were some) said that narcissistic Crane attempted suicide for the attention, expecting the ship to come back and pick him up. When the ship did come back, Hart wasn't found, not even his body drowned, and the captain resumed his course for Havana assuming the poet had been devoured by sharks.

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Tags: Hart Crane, Tennessee Williams, The Broken Tower, Caedmon records, the spoken word