Tran 1 Andrew Tran Professor Davidson LTEN 172 19 November 2012 The Citys Displacement of the Human Form

as the Divine Image in Crane and Williams The dawning of the modern era brought with it sweeping changes in every sphere of life, and so it is unsurprising that those writing at the time could use no less than superlatives when trying to portray precisely what the new era was, what it looked like, and what it portended. Perhaps the most meaningful and spectacular manifestation of the modern is the urban city, the site of never-ending spectacles of light, sound, advertisement, and entertainment, with its buildings and monuments of unheard-of proportions. The effect of such a phenomenon on modern poetry was to give the impression that something superhuman or supernatural was passing into the world. The urban city, as the prime symbol of modernity, is often represented in modernist poetry as a divine presence which dwarfs the stature of man, but also presents the possibility of human elevation. In William Carlos Williams "The Great Figure" and Hart Cranes "Proem: to Brooklyn Bridge," the city is represented through two signifiers of urban life, a fire-truck and the Brooklyn Bridge respectively, the sight and presence of which arrests the speaker in a religious rapture. Each of these poems portrays the divinity of the signifiers as being dependent upon the property of obscurity, or un-definition; the signifiers (and so the City) appear unearthly and supernatural because they defy human cognition. As such, they are events which allow the human speaker a glimpse of the inhuman, and perhaps enlarge the speaker by virtue of this experience. The Brooklyn Bridge of Cranes Proem: to Brooklyn Bridge is fitting as a signifier for the modern city because it is a by-product of the presence of cities; it is possible only when cities have

Tran 2 reached a level of prevalence which necessitates an expansion of urban space, or a connection between existing urban spaces. Cranes poem possesses features of both epic and Romantic poetry which heavily imply the divine status of the Bridge. The poem begins with an exalted image of a seagull in flight that resembles the invocation of the muses which traditionally opens epic poetry, and so implies that to talk of the Brooklyn Bridge is to discuss matters of divine proportions The bird is linked with initiations and with new beginnings in the speakers initial exclamation, How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest / The seagulls wings shall dip and pivot him, in which the new day, or several day-breaks, are wedded to it (ll.1-2). It is also described as an energizing force much as the muse is a force of inspiration: Shedding white rings of tumult, building high / Over the chained bay waters Liberty (ll.3-4). The seagull emits ripples of tumult, of turbulent, kinetic energy, which allows the construction of Liberty high over the East River, as the inspirational power of the muse makes possible the construction of epic poetry, which with no middle flight intends to soar above poems of less momentous subject matter. The physical elevation of the seagull also ties into the overarching theme of curves, of upward ascents which serve to bridge the distance between the speaker and an experience of the exalted. Crane also utilizes dramatic apostrophe repeatedly throughout the poem, as in O harp and altar, O Sleepless as the river under thee, and Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced, which recalls the rapture of the Romantic poet addressing some Natural scene as a holy medium, through which elevated sentiments are transmitted (ll.13, 29, 41). The Brooklyn Bridge stands in place of Nature as the poets inspiration with which he carries on a conversation, as between priest and god. That this divinity is dependent on some undefinable quality of the Bridge is made obvious when the speaker plainly calls it Obscure as that heaven of the Jews, and describes how Only in darkness is *its+ shadow clear (ll.25, 38). The divine form exists in a state of darkness, or of the ungraspable.

Tran 3 Obscurity is a traditional marker of the divine as a result of the infinite potential of the deity, of its inability to be sufficiently depicted by human works. This incomprehensibility to the cognitive mind is the sentiment evoked in the cryptic fourth stanza, where the speaker sees the Bridge spanning the river and declares to it that there is left / Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,- / Implicitly thy freedom staying thee! (ll.15-16). The bridge, by its spanning of the river, looks to be in motion, yet there is the impression of motion ever unspent, that although the physical bridge has spanned the river, the motion is ongoing, the Bridge is not exhausted of energy. This energy, the implicit freedom or power of the bridge, is what stays it, and so here is the contradiction, the Bridges mantle of obscurity: the Bridge is both moving and not moving, the motion is both completed and yet ongoing, it is in possession of energy which renders it inert in some way. This idea comes into sharper focus when the fourth stanza is contrasted with what follows; A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets, / Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning, / A jest falls from the speechless caravan (ll.18-20). Here in the fifth stanza, a mere mortal ascends to the height of the Bridge intent upon suicide and hesitates, in a petty parody of the Bridges paradox of motion and motionlessness. He attempts the suspension of movement, but then his shrill shirt balloons as he jumps, and in the completion of the action he is defined a bedlamite, and as such a ridiculous thing, his passing is marked with a jest. The Bridge, as a paradoxical figure, avoids easy definition, it cannot be called simply this or that the way the bedlamite could. Thus, the Bridge eludes the constraints of human cognition by being two things at once, simultaneously moving and not moving. Unlike the bedlamite, it perpetually maintains this tension and is not destroyed. Like Jesus who died and yet did not die, the Bridge moves and does not move, and as Jesus broke the law of mortality, the Bridge seems to break laws of motion, and by virtue of this mysterious process, the Bridge is divine. By this contrast between Bridge and bedlamite, Crane communicates how the City dwarfs man, how the spectacle of it evokes sentiments of something supernatural that is not present in man.

Tran 4 In the final lines of the poem, Crane suggests that the Bridge, and so the modern City, is capable of raising the viewer to its own exalted status. The speaker asks the Brooklyn Bridge to Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend / And of the curveship lend a myth to God (ll. 43-44). He is asking that the Bridge descend among men, as God had through Jesus, and lend a myth to, or towards, God, through what Crane calls a curveship, which might be defined as a bridging action in which an ascent is implied, an upward curve similar to the curves of the Bridge. The beginning and the middle of the poem create the sense of this curveship, as the reader begins with the seagull soaring high in the air, then to the Bridge, then the bedlamite. By presenting the speakers wandering gaze in such a way, Crane suggests that the sight of the Bridge creates a curving structure in the mind, a hierarchy which places man at the bottom, the ethereal seagull at the top like the dove-shaped Holy Spirit, and the Bridge between, as Jesus was meant to bridge God and man. In effect, the Bridge reveals a path towards the divine by the mere sight of it, and makes imaginable a state higher than what man has attained. The fire-truck of William Carlos Williams The Great Figure is another useful signifier of the City. It exists as a piece of the fire department which is a result of a certain level of bureaucracy; it is a machine built for public use; its color scheme is meant to grab the eye, advertisement-like. These properties of systematization, of bureaucracy, publicity, and visibility, are all characteristics of the city and of modernity in general. In The Great Figure, Williams utilizes the structure and meter of the poem to present the firetruck in an exalted position, as the centerpiece of the action of the poem, and of the gaze of the speaker and the reader. Williams lengthens the opening and closing lines, while keeping the center lines short and terse where the sight of the fire-truck resides, and so the visual structure immediately draws attention to it. As Peter Halter points out in his article on The Great Figure, the opening two lines constitute two completely iambic lines with three accents in each of them: Among the rain / and lights / I saw the figure 5 (Halter, ll.1-3). Thus the poem begins with a couplet which culminates in the

Tran 5 introduction of the figure 5, after which there is an abrupt shift in meter: in gold / on a red/ firetruck / moving / tense/ unheeded (ll. 4-9). The shift creates a momentous impression of the reader, as a change both in the meter and also in the subject matter: from setting, rain and lights, to the subject of the figure 5. The direct visual image of the fire-truck ends with lengthier lines, with what Halter calls syncopated double-beat lines, before ending with another description of setting: to gong clangs / siren howls / and wheels rumbling / through the dark city (ll.10-14). The sight of the fire-truck is framed by longer lines and descriptions of setting, both of which contrast with the image to embolden it. Also, in his article, Halter aptly mentions how the effect of the line-lengths creates an impression of slowing down to a timelessness in the presence of the figure 5 on the fire-truck. The short lines direct the attention to each single detail *but+ the effect, however, is not noticeable to the same degree throughout the poem (Halter). The shorter lines urge the reader to pay closer attention to the individual words therein, whereas the longer lines allow the eyes to absorb the multiple words all-atonce, to absorb the gestalt rather than the particulars. By doing so, Williams creates the impression of the figure 5 and the fire-truck as a unique particular arising from the mundane general. That the image is not only singular, but divine, is apparent from the sparse but effective diction, which recall a scene of mythological importance, such as the appearance of a sky or storm god. The setting is among rain / and lights, with thunder-like sounds of gong clangs and siren howls, which make it seem as though the fire-truck is traversing the sky, with all the sights and sounds of a terrible chariot piloted by a wrathful deity. The impression of divinity is also heightened by the strange addition of the word unheeded to describe the fire-truck and the figure 5, which seems to stand at odds with all the commotion being made. Apparently, the spectacle is seen only by the speaker and no one else, which recalls Biblical visitations in which God appears to a select few, or appears differently to different groups, as when Jesus appeared to clusters of his Apostles after the crucifixion.

Tran 6 The speakers sparse diction is characteristic of Williams poetics, but it also serves to lessen the stature of the human speaker next to the figure and the fire-truck in a way. The diction is descriptive and vivid, but also unadorned, unmodified, and so the scene feels more like a photograph than a narrative. In effect, the human element is minimized as the speaker describes the scene without qualifiers, merely reporting the sensual details in as bare language as possible. This implies that the grandeur of the scene is innate, is within the fire-truck and the figure themselves, and is not a result of the human interpretation of the speaker. The fire-truck and the figure are not being raised above the level of the mundane by the imagination, but the reverse; the fire-truck and figure are holy but hidden, and they are exalting the viewer by allowing him a glimpse of holiness. The simultaneously visible and invisible nature of the fire-truck, like the motion and motionlessness of the Bridge, lend the air of obscurity which is vital to its divinity. The fire-truck should be a painfully visible thing, of glaring red and gold color and howling sound, yet as a public entity it is also on some level invisible, unheeded, since it is a part of the system of the city, of the environment. The human eye, trained to pick out particulars, naturally glazes over such public sights as these, as fire hydrants and fire escapes, and so the spectacle of the fire-truck is as miraculous and mysterious as the moving/unmoving bridge. The condition of obscurity is also heightened by the abstractness of the subject matter: what is arresting the gaze is a number, the figure 5. As an abstraction, it has no concrete reality, yet here it is upon the fire-truck, assaulting the speakers senses. It is an instance of spirit miraculously made flesh. What is more, the poems title The Great Figure creates expectations of the humanoid form, which makes the figure 5s appearance the more striking. Williams is pointing out the rise of the abstract, of the undefined, of the City. It is not Zeus or Odin riding through the rain, it is a Number 5 written in eye-catching gold on the side of a city fire-truck. This idea suggests a displacement of the human form, of humanity; if the number 5 is what arrests us, gives us the divine rapture, then the divine no longer even resembles man, and we are small beside it.

Tran 7 In a way, Crane and Williams are providing a deconstruction of what the divine is; it is first and foremost a spectacle that possesses the senses as gods possess the soul, but it is also on some level, beyond understanding, and so is boundless. Knowledge of the divine is said to enrich the soul, and so the speakers of The Great Figure and Proem: to Brooklyn Bridge feel like mundane entities in contact with something greater than themselves. That these signifiers, the Bridge and the fire-truck, are man-made objects adds another layer to their complexity as holy symbols. As products of man, they might be evidence of the divine in man, or perhaps evidence of mans recent entry into the realm of divine capabilities.

Tran 8 Works Cited Crane, Hart. Proem: to Brooklyn Bridge. Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 390. Print. Halter, Peter: From The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Modern American Poetry. 1994. Cary Nelson, Bartholomew Brinkman. University of Illinois. 17 November 2012. <http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/williams/figure.htm> Williams, William Carlos. The Great Figure. Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 167. Print.