Oct. 26
Hart Crane's "Voyagers II"
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At the age of twenty-four, Hart Crane penned "Voyages II," a poem based on his summer sojourn in the Caribbean on the Isle of Pines when he was fifteen. At the time of its writing, he was in the early ecstatic phase of his love for Emil Oppfer, a Danish sailor. A portion of the poem reads:
--- And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processional where
her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;
Take the Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptered terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers' hands.
And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides, --
Adagios of islands ...
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