“The Bridge: The Harbor Dawn” by Hart Crane
| Insistently through sleep—a tide of voices— | ||
| They meet you listening midway in your dream, | 400 years and | |
| The long, tired sounds, fog-insulated noises: | more . . . or is | |
| Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails, | it from the | |
| Far strum of fog horns . . .signals dispersed in veils | soundless shore | |
| of sleep that | ||
| And then a truck will lumber past the wharves | time | |
| As winch engines begin throbbing on some deck; | ||
| Or a drunken stevedore’s howl and thud below | ||
| Comes echoing alley-upward through dim snow. | ||
| And if they take your sleep away sometimes | ||
| They give it back again. Soft sleeves of sound | ||
| Attend the darkling harbor, the pillowed bay; | ||
| Somewhere out there in blankness steam | ||
| Spills into steam, and wanders, washed away | ||
| — Flurried by keen fifings, eddied | ||
| Among distant chiming buoys — adrift. The sky, |
| Cool feathery fold, suspends, distills | ||
| This wavering slumber. . . . Slowly — | ||
| Immemorially the window, half-covered chair | ||
| Asks nothing but this sheath of pallid air. | ||
| And you beside me, blessèd now while sirens | recalls you to | |
| Sing to us, stealthily weave us into day — | your love, | |
| Serenely now, before day claims our eyes | there in a | |
| Your cool arms murmurously about me lay. | waking dream | |
| to merge | ||
| While myriad snowy hands are clustering at the | your seed | |
| panes — | ||
| your hands within my hands are deeds; | ||
| my tongue upon your throat — singing | ||
| arms close; eyes wide, undoubtful | ||
| dark | ||
| drink the dawn — | ||
| a forest shudders in your hair! | ||
| The window goes blonde slowly. Frostily clears. | — with whom? | |
| From Cyclopean towers across Manhattan waters | ||
| — Two — three bright window-eyes aglitter, disk | ||
| The sun, released — aloft with cold gulls hither. | ||
| The fog leans one last moment on the sill. | Who is the | |
| Under the mistletoe of dreams, a star — | woman with | |
| As though to join us at some distant hill — | us in the | |
| Turns in the waking west and goes to sleep. | dawn? . . . | |
| whose is the | ||
| flesh our feet | ||
| have moved | ||
| upon? |
The Complete Poems and Selected Prose of Hart Crane, 1966, p. 54
thispublicaddress.com/tPA1/2002/05/harbor-dawn.html
Thanks to Jeff Ward at thispublicaddress.com for the painstaking formatting; he notes that Crane’s poem “needs to be presented with its glosses intact. One of the interesting bits of textual history is that Crane went to great lengths to assure that the glosses would not override the main text, even if that meant the were lost in the bleed into the books spine. The glosses are almost a ‘machine for thinking’ about the text though, rather than an explication. They ask the key questions.”