monday poem #53: Hart Crane, "Garden Abstract"
Mark Doty has written about liking Hart Crane's work, which is how it ended up on my list. I like it too, although some of it is a little too abstract for me, a little too self-conscious about the beauty of its language. I admire beautiful language, but I admire the appearance of effortlessness even more; most of my favorite poems are ones that manage to have both together.
I could have chosen "My Grandmother's Love Letters," or "Recitative" (from which the book's title comes), or "Chaplinesque," which has what may be my favorite two lines in the book: "We can evade you, and all else but the heart: / What blame to us if the heart live on."
I chose this one partly because, despite the title, it seems to me one of the book's least abstract poems. Also, I am a sucker for iambic pentameter.Garden Abstract
The apple on its bough is her desire,-
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the trees and its green fingers.
And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.
- Hart Crane
from White Buildings (1926)
I could have chosen "My Grandmother's Love Letters," or "Recitative" (from which the book's title comes), or "Chaplinesque," which has what may be my favorite two lines in the book: "We can evade you, and all else but the heart: / What blame to us if the heart live on."
I chose this one partly because, despite the title, it seems to me one of the book's least abstract poems. Also, I am a sucker for iambic pentameter.Garden Abstract
The apple on its bough is her desire,-
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the trees and its green fingers.
And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.
- Hart Crane
from White Buildings (1926)