DDCPoetry

Original poem reprinted online here:   "At Melville's Tomb" by Hart Crane Originally read: July 21, 2013 More information about the Poet: Hart Crane This poem is an homage to Herman Melville, in the sense that the references to nautical terms relate to the speaker's experience with Melville.  Written in quatrains, the poem also has an unpinned rhyme scheme -- making the poem more vers libre than any other form.  Also each stanza is end-stopped giving each stanza an individual importance. In the first stanza, the focus is on the the perspective.  There's two going at play here, the speaker and how the speaker interpreted the "he" to observe the same see.    So overall is what the speaker sees and interprets. "He" sees, "Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge / The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath / An embassy".  When the line ends with "An embassy" there's a judgment call -- yes, these are drowned men...

Original poem reprinted online here:   "My Grandmother's Love Letters" by Hart Crane Originally read: July 21, 2013 More information about the Poet: Hart Crane I've been re-reading this poem and my notes, and, the poem, and, yes, there's the theme of memory and forgetting; however, the poem is not as cut and dry with the theme.  Memory is described in a multitude of ways -- as a concept and in the personal. In the first stanza there's the rhetoric of memory being compared to stars, "There are no stars tonight / But those of memory."  In this way, there's a physical representation of memory.  "Yet how much room for memory there is / In the loose girdle of soft rain."  And with a physical representation there's a way to quantify memory. The second stanza continues with space, "There is even room enough /For the letters of my mother's mother, / Elizabeth."  Pat me noted the specific name giving a personal effect to the sp...

Original poem reprinted online here:   "Exile" by Hart Crane Originally read: July 7, 2013 More information about the Poet: Hart Crane Quatrains.  ABAB rhyme scheme.  I don't know when this poem was written in Hart Crane's career.  I want to assume early, and this is because the style is so forward and easily read here which caught me off guard.  I'm used to Hart Crane poems like "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen"  and   "The Bridge"  which are heavily allusive pieces not only through myth, and pop culture, but also within the multiple meanings of words as well. But with this poem, there are big things that are hidden or rather in a state of exile -- the subject, the speaker -- but the language is very forthcoming. "My hands have not touched pleasure since your hand, -- / No, -- nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell.'"  There's not tricks in these lines, maybe the punctuation with the double dashes which, around ...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Legend" by Hart Crane Originally read: February 16, 2013 More information about the Poet: Hart Crane I have a hard time with Hart Crane in general.  He's poems like "The Bridge" and "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" are interesting technique and subject wise, but very hard to decipher why and how those techniques and subject are used.  I like his work, but I kind of distance myself from his poems unless I want to spend many nights deciphering individual lines. But when I came across this poem, I thought, "this one isn't too much for me to handle" after the first read.  And after the second read I know how I want to analyze this poem -- through one line. "The legend of their youth into the noon" This doesn't seem much but there are two words to look out for in the poem, "legend" and "noon"; or rather, how the speaker configures and constantly redefines these tw...