Poems by Harold Hart Crane

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Quaker Hill

Perspective never withers from their eyes;

They keep that docile edict of the Spring

That blends March with August Antarctic skies:

These are but cows that see no other thing

Than grass and snow, and their own inner being

Through the rich halo that they do not trouble

Even to cast upon the seasons fleeting

Though they should thin and die on last year’s stubble.

by Harold Hart Crane

The Tunnel

Performances, assortments, résumés—

Up Times Square to Columbus Circle lights

Channel the congresses, nightly sessions,

Refractions of the thousand theatres, faces—

Mysterious kitchens. . . . You shall search them all.

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,

by Harold Hart Crane

Southern Cross

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!

by Harold Hart Crane

O Carib Isle!

The tarantula rattling at the lily’s foot

Across the feet of the dead, laid in white sand

Near the coral beach—nor zigzag fiddle crabs

Side-stilting from the path (that shift, subvert

And anagrammatize your name)—No, nothing here

Below the palsy that one eucalyptus lifts

In wrinkled shadows—mourns.

And yet suppose

by Harold Hart Crane

A Name For All

Moonmoth and grasshopper that flee our page

And still wing on, untarnished of the name

We pinion to your bodies to assuage

Our envy of your freedom—we must maim

Because we are usurpers, and chagrined—

And take the wing and scar it in the hand.

Names we have, even, to clap on the wind;

But we must die, as you, to understand.

by Harold Hart Crane

Fear

The host, he says that all is well

And the fire-wood glow is bright;

The food has a warm and tempting smell,-

But on the window licks the night.

Pile on the logs... Give me your hands,

Friends! No,- it is not fright...

But hold me... somewhere I heard demands...

And on the window licks the night.

by Harold Hart Crane

Repose Of Rivers

The willows carried a slow sound,

A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.

I could never remember

That seething, steady leveling of the marshes

Till age had brought me to the sea.

Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves

Where cypresses shared the noon’s

Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.

by Harold Hart Crane

Cutty Sark

I met a man in South Street, tall—

a nervous shark tooth swung on his chain.

His eyes pressed through green glass

—green glasses, or bar lights made them

so—

shine—

GREEN—

eyes—

by Harold Hart Crane

Atlantis

Through the bound cable strands, the arching path

Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,—

Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate

The whispered rush, telepathy of wires.

Up the index of night, granite and steel—

Transparent meshes—fleckless the gleaming staves—

Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream

As though a god were issue of the strings. . . .

by Harold Hart Crane

The Dance

The swift red flesh, a winter king—

Who squired the glacier woman down the sky?

She ran the neighing canyons all the spring;

She spouted arms; she rose with maize—to die.

And in the autumn drouth, whose burnished hands

With mineral wariness found out the stone

Where prayers, forgotten, streamed the mesa sands?

by Harold Hart Crane

Carmen De Boheme

Sinuously winding through the room

On smokey tongues of sweetened cigarettes, —

Plaintive yet proud the cello tones resume

The andante of smooth hopes and lost regrets.

Bright peacocks drink from flame-pots by the wall,

Just as absinthe-sipping women shiver through

With shimmering blue from the bowl in Circe's hall.

Their brown eyes blacken, and the blue drop hue.

by Harold Hart Crane

The Great Western Plains

The little voices of the prairie dogs

Are tireless . . .

They will give three hurrahs

Alike to stage, equestrian, and pullman,

And all unstingingly as to the moon.

And Fifi's bows and poodle ease

Whirl by them centred on the lap

Of Lottie Honeydew, movie queen,

by Harold Hart Crane