—: My Grandmother’s Love Letters :—
There are no stars to-night But those of memory. Yet how much room for memory there is In the loose girdle of soft rain. There is even room enough For the letters of my mother's mother, Elizabeth, That have been pressed so long Into a corner of the roof That they are brown and soft, And liable to melt as snow. Over the greatness of such space Steps must be gentle. It is all hung by an invisible white hair. It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air. And I ask myself : “Are your fingers long enough to play Old keys that are but echoes: Is the silence strong enough To carry back the music to its source And back to you again As though to her?” Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand Through much of what she would not understand; And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.
Hart Crane (1899-1932)
P: The Dial (1920+), The Little Review (1920+), The Double Dealer (1921), The Measure (1921), Broom (1922), The Fugitive (1923+), Secession (1923+), 1924 (1924), Poetry (1926), The Calendar (1926+), The Lariat (1927), The Monthly Criterion (1927), The Nation (1927), Transition (1927); A: AMV (1922+), The American Caravan (1927), The Best Poems (1927), The Third Book of Modern Verse (1927); C: White Buildings (1926), The Bridge (1930); translations, etc.
Born in Garrettsville, Ohio; later moved to New York: “His formal education was not continued beyond high school. Since then he has been employed as a mechanic, a clerk, a copywriter, etc.” (The American Caravan, 1927) Corresponded regularly with Harriet Monroe, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters, Gertrude Stein, et al.
Hart Crane was a queer poet, and I have always read the final lines through that lens: “I would lead my grandmother by the hand, Through much of much of what she wouldn’t understand.” Doing a little research, it turns out I am not alone in this view; “Queer theorist Tim Dean argues that the obscurity of Crane's style owes partially to the necessities of being a semi-public gay man—not quite closeted, but also, as legally and culturally necessary, not open: ‘The intensity responsible for Crane's particular form of difficulty involves not only linguistic considerations but also culturally subjective concerns. This intensity produces a kind of privacy that is comprehensible in terms of the cultural construction of homosexuality and its attendant institutions of privacy’.” (Dean, 1996)
Illustration: ‘Anointment Of Our Well Dressed Critic or Why Waste The Eggs!’ by Hart Crane (The Little Review, 1922)
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More poems about mothers . . .
Cheers for the share @Charles Gilmore, Jr. :-)