Stephen Crane’s The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) is a strange little book, but maybe not as strange as I first thought. Although commonly classified as poetry, I note that Crane is careful to make a vaguer (or more specific?) claim in his title.
Poetry anthologists pick out the most striking, weirdest bits of the book, making it seem stranger than it is. But also less strange. The original text looks like this:
Please imagine the rest of the blank page. I am diluting the effect just be eliminating the white space. This bizarrerie floats atop the page. This poem still jolts me, one jolt after another – the heart, the narrator’s strange question, the creature’s stranger answer.
Taken one after another, though, I find in the 68 pieces a lot of conventional sentiments and flat statements among the surprises:
LXVI
IF I SHOULD CAST OFF THIS TATTERED COAT
AND GO FREE INTO THE MIGHTY SKY ;
IF I SHOULD FIND NOTHING THERE
BUT A VAST BLUE,
ECHOLESS, IGNORANT, --
WHAT THEN?
Is that readable? I think I know why anthologists turn off the all-caps. The failure of the speaker to find a noun is interesting, but otherwise Crane is giving a conventional idea an unusual typographic package. If they were recast, would they have the same effect, or any effect at all?
LVI
A man feared that he might find an assassin; another that he might find a victim. One was more wise than the other.
versus (plus lots of white space):
Still, in a dozen or so poems, in a line or image, I just marvel. Where did Crane get this stuff:
I
Black riders came from the sea.
There was clang and clang of spear and shield,
and clash and clash of hoof and heel,
wild shouts and the wave of hair
in the rush upon the wind:
thus the ride of sin.
Crane had been writing about battles, for example in The Red Badge of Courage, published in the same year, but here he moves back to something like a ballad, like he is translating from the Old English. I find it hard not to think of Tolkien, although he reverses the scene, doesn’t he, with the water going after the black riders.
Many of the other poems hover around Crane’s novel. References to bravery and cowardice are frequent. “’Tell brave deeds of war,’” poem XV begins, which is just what Crane had been doing, what he was still doing in the 1896 collection The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the Civil War, but at the end the poet is skeptical – “Ah, I think there were braver deeds.” Surely there are.
..but "the ride of sin" spoils it - why drag morality into an astonishing visual image?
ReplyDeleteYes, exactly! It's the curse of this book.
ReplyDeleteThe shadow of the clergyman father lurking in the background, no doubt.
ReplyDeleteAh, sure. I guess I'll see if Crane outgrows or suppresses or channels the impulse into something more interesting.
ReplyDeleteCrane might be speaking of specific riders, of a specific sin. What's wrong with morality? He's not exactly moralizing here.
ReplyDelete...except that he doesn't specify which riders or which sin. He moves from specifics to an abstraction - which sin? Or is it Sin as a personification, but we can't tell because it's all in capital letters?
DeleteYes, worse than moralizing, Crane is allegorizing, with the usual arbitrariness. "THUS THE RIDE OF FEAR," "THUS THE RIDE OF LUST," etc.
ReplyDeleteI guess I don't know enough about poetry to see what's objectionable about all of this.
ReplyDeleteTHUS THE RIDE OF CONSUMERISM. THUS THE RIDE OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS. THUS THE RIDE OF ANYTHING BAD. In Poem III, Crane lets his reader find his own nightmare.
ReplyDeleteConventional thoughts in conventional language, who needs it?
Conventional thoughts in original language, now we've got poetry.
Original thoughts - well, those are almost too rare to mention.
That critter gnawing on his own heart, and the black riders emerging from the waves, are images, even language, that have stuck with me since I read them 25 years ago. I am not surprised or even disappointed that Crane did not quickly produce 66 more as good.
I can see how a series of these sorts of things would be annoying, sure. Reading a single poem like this, I'm not bothered.
Deletenote: "riders to the sea" by synge; some comment on nature vs. religion there... some connection between synge and crane?
DeleteThis will sound, and also be, glib, but Pound invented Imagism by lopping off that last "sin" line. Whatever aesthetic idea I am applying is from the other side of that move, not Crane's side.
ReplyDeleteI don't know enough about Synge to know about any connection. I know almost nothing about Synge.
But if you lop off "sin," you lose the half rhyme with "wind," and the shock of a short thought following a long image.
ReplyDeleteIf you cut everything but "thus the ride of sin," you have a Lydia Davis story.
ReplyDeleteNow that made me laugh.
DeleteLosing the rhyme wouldn't bother Pound. The shock, though, he would still want the shock.
ReplyDeleteSome of the poems have a little more narrative, enough to head towards Davis, or maybe Aesop.
An ALL CAPS poet - who knew? Maybe e. e. cummings was exposed to too much Crane as a youth.
ReplyDeleteAt some point I suppose I will try to read something about Crane and will find out how original, or otherwise, he really was.
ReplyDelete