Passage
Harold Hart Crane 1899 (Garrettsville, Ohio) – 1932 (Gulf of Mexico)
Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
I heard the sea.
In sapphire arenas of the hills
I was promised an improved infancy.
Sulking, sanctioning the sun,
My memory I left in a ravine,-
Casual louse that tissues the buck-wheat,
Aprons rocks, congregates pears
In moonlit bushels
And wakens alleys with a hidden cough.
Dangerously the summer burned
(I had joined the entrainments of the wind).
The shadows of boulders lengthened my back:
In the bronze gongs of my cheeks
The rain dried without odour.
'It is not long, it is not long;
See where the red and black
Vine-stanchioned valleys-': but the wind
Died speaking through the ages that you know
And bug, chimney-sooted heart of man!
So was I turned about and back, much as your smoke
Compiles a too well-known biography.
The evening was a spear in the ravine
That throve through very oak. And had I walked
The dozen particular decimals of time?
Touching an opening laurel, I found
A thief beneath, my stolen book in hand.
''Why are you back here-smiling an iron coffin?
' 'To argue with the laurel,' I replied:
'Am justified in transience, fleeing
Under the constant wonder of your eyes-.'
He closed the book. And from the Ptolemies
Sand troughed us in a glittering,, abyss.
A serpent swam a vertex to the sun
-On unpaced beaches leaned its tongue and
drummed.
What fountains did I hear? What icy speeches?
Memory, committed to the page, had broke.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 22, 2023
- 1:14 min read
- 132 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | XAXA BCXXXX XDEXX XEDXXFA CXXXX XXXX AXBXXXF |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,405 |
Words | 250 |
Stanzas | 7 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 6, 5, 7, 5, 4, 7 |
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"Passage" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/16820/passage>.
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