from The Bridge(published: 1930), poet's age: 31

to Brooklyn Bridge: a paraphrase

a day in the life of a bridge,
or, a gull's eye view of the world.

The reader should know that there is a gull, too,
in Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry;
right before the section where he confesses his personal short-comings.
Where he confronts, guardedly, his sexuality.
(Is this represented by the yellow underside of the gull?)
And also that in the poem Whitman projects himself into the future.
And says, he know how we feel.

Well back to the bridge, and the seagull. Is it the same gull?
(He'd be 65 years old, at least!)

The gull sees the sail boats in the bay,
as do the office workers who feel forsaken as the gull turns away.
They are, we are, like figures on a sales report, being filed away.
(Dear Hart: This is a tough metaphor to deconstruct.)

Still all the eyes see the traffic hurrying into the city,
like a line of patrons at a movie theatre
returning repeatedly to see
a movie whose ending is always withheld from them;
and so they never understand.

God watches, too.

And then there is the bridge.
It is like a footprint left by the sun.

An indigent goes there to commit suicide.
Is it just a jest from the traffic, and the noon sky,
that falls through the bridge?
The traffic continues.
The bridge is almost sensate, but unmoved.

It gives something, but what and why?
Is it that its majesty, built on the back of humble labor,
Forsaken and anonymous as the office-workers,
Gives something back, in terms of forgiveness and respect
To the salt of the earth, and the outsider?

Physically it gives a shadow,
A space left over from the world of commerce,
Where a sense of release, respect, adventure,
Is possible; for the outsider;

Who hopes, that a metaphor,
is able to grant such things.

dedication: to a niece who hates poetry.


Why Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge?

Crane wrote, inspired by Eliot, but less gloomily, though still thorny, difficult and dense; the sometime hallmarks of modernity; at least of Eliot, Stevens, and Crane; and as such encourage analysis. It's my opinion that the most useful and fundamental form of analysis is simply a well-rendered recital of a poem, the anaylsis being implied by the inflection of the voice. And now-a-days with hypertext and such, we can have both a reading and whatever additional analysis we might desire all just a click away. And so that's why, in part.

The poem is also noteworthy for its intriguing mixture of modernism and elizabethan style, its use of the archaic pronoun Thou in its varied forms, the standard iambic pentameter that it's written-in, but even beyond that, a rhythmic style, grandeur or solemnity, that sounds and feels Elizabethan, derived from King James. And so provides a venue to learning or review about the iambic line, in action as it were. Its probably useful to compare Crane's Proem with a short speech from Shakespeare, say, Jaques' Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like it. We hope to get into all these things.

So the poem is chosen partly for its complexity and also for its historical, anachronistic tendencies. These recommend a mode of presentation, that breaks a thing down rigorously, and displays the whatever insights obtained conveniently; this being achieved by using the current hypertextual methods with all their virtuosity, in the hope that through this process we prove, provisionally, the proposition that for poetry understanding equals enjoyment.