Hart Crane > Quotes

“One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.”
― Hart Crane

“I wanted you, nameless Woman of the South,
No wraith, but utterly—as still more alone
The Southern Cross takes night
And lifts her girdles from her, one by one—
High, cool,
wide from the slowly smoldering fire
Of lower heavens,—
vaporous scars!

Eve! Magdalene!
or Mary, you?

Whatever call—falls vainly on the wave.
O simian Venus, homeless Eve,
Unwedded, stumbling gardenless to grieve
Windswept guitars on lonely decks forever;
Finally to answer all within one grave!

And this long wake of phosphor,
iridescent
Furrow of all our travel—trailed derision!
Eyes crumble at its kiss. Its long-drawn spell
Incites a yell. Slid on that backward vision
The mind is churned to spittle, whispering hell.

I wanted you . . . The embers of the Cross
Climbed by aslant and huddling aromatically.
It is blood to remember; it is fire
To stammer back . . . It is
God—your namelessness. And the wash—

All night the water combed you with black
Insolence. You crept out simmering, accomplished.
Water rattled that stinging coil, your
Rehearsed hair—docile, alas, from many arms.
Yes, Eve—wraith of my unloved seed!

The Cross, a phantom, buckled—dropped below the dawn.
Light drowned the lithic trillions of your spawn.”
― Hart Crane, The Bridge

“نتكيّف خاضعين
مكتفين بتعزيّات جزافية
كتلك التى تضعها الريح
فى جيوب عميقة وواسعة
لأنه لا يزال فى وسعنا أن نحب العالم،
نحن الذين نجد قطا صغيرا على العتبة ونعرف
كيف نحميه من قساوة الشارع
فى فجوة دافئة مغطاة بالريش.
سوف نسير جانبيا،
وحتى البسمة المتكلفة الأخيرة
نتحاشى حكم ذلك الإبهام المحتوم
الذى يدير نحونا ببطء سبّابته المجعدة
مواجهين النظرة الشذراء الفاترة ببراءة
وبالكثير من الدهشة!
ومع ذلك، فتلك السقطات البارعة ليست أكاذيب
أكثر مما هى استدارات أى خيزرانة مطواع،
وليس مأتمنا، بصورةٍ ما، مشروعاً.
فى وسعنا التملص منكم، ومن كل شىء آخر،
لكن ليس من القلب:
ما ذنبنا إذا بقى القلب حيّا؟
تفرض اللعبة ابتسامات متكلفة،
لكننا رأينا القمر
يصنع فى المعابر المقفرة كأس ضحك مقدسة
من منفضة فارغة
وعبر أصوات المرح والبحث جميعا
سمعنا مواء قطٍ فى البرية”
― Hart Crane, White Buildings

“Love: a burnt match skating in a urinal. ”
― Hart Crane

“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.”
― Hart Crane

“Permit me voyage, love, into your hands... ”
― Hart Crane

“I can remember much forgetfulness.”
― Hart Crane

“O sleepless as the river under thee, / Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod, / Onto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend / And of the curveship lend a myth to God.”
― Hart Crane, The Bridge

“The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And all through the sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.”
― Hart Crane

“There are no stars tonight but those of memory.”
― Hart Crane, The Complete Poems

“--And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,--
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,--
Hasten, while they are true,--sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.”
― Hart Crane

“Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, --
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.”
― Hart Crane

“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!”
― Hart Crane

“And as the bandage knot was tightened
The two men smiled into each other's eyes.”
― Hart Crane

“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.”
― Hart Crane, The Complete Poems

“How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day ...”
― Hart Crane

“It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader’s consciousness henceforward.”
― Hart Crane, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose

“O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precincts of the lark’s return;
Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
In single chrysalis the many twain —
Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow
And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom —
Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time’s realm
As love strikes clear direction for the helm”
― Hart Crane, The Bridge

“Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.”
― Hart Crane

“Voyages III

Infinite consanguinity it bears
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.

And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise,
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking!
and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,-
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands . .”
― Hart Crane

“Приспособяваме се тихо към живота,
доволни и от бледите утехи,
които вятърът довява
и пуска в празните ни джобове.
Но още храним обич към света
щом спираме пред гладно котенце на прага,
готови да го приютим в протрития ръкав,
да го спасим от улицата - шумна и жестока.
(...)
Играта е такава - кара ни да се усмихваме насила.
И все пак виждаме луната, спряла над самотна уличка,
да преобръща празна кофа в искряща чаша на смеха,
и все пак чуваме през веселия шум и нашите стремежи
гласа на котенце, което вика сред пустинята.”
― Hart Crane

“The bottom of the sea is cruel.”
― Hart Crane

“Infinite consanguinity it bears -
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.

And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise, -
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking!
and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change, -
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands ...”
― Hart Crane, The Complete Poems

“My Grandmother's Love Letters"

There are no stars tonight
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 tremble 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, The Complete Poems

“There's nothing like this in the world,' you say, knowing I cannot touch your hand and look too, into that godless cleft of sky where nothing turns but dead sands flashing. '--And never to quite understand!”
― Hart Crane, The Collected Poems of Hart Crane

“The siren of the springs of guilty song—
Let us take her on the incandescent wax Striated with nuances, nervosities
That we are heir to”
― Hart Crane, White Buildings

“Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas
The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space”
― Hart Crane

“Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.”
― Hart Crane

“Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.”
― Hart Crane