Poem of the Week – My Grandmother’s Love Letters by Hart Crane
Hart Crane’s brief poetic career can be seen as an ambitious response to TS Eliot’s intimidating tome, The Wasteland. Rejecting Eliot’s despondency and cynicism over the advent of the modern world, Crane sought to celebrate the intoxicating excitement of being alive in a transformative time.
Steeped in Elizabethan literature and armed with the aesthetics of early American poets such as Walt Whitman, Crane aimed to establish a poetically expressed mythology that paid homage to his literary heroes and acknowledged the disparate traditions from which the American vernacular was born.
Crane’s failed epic, The Bridge, showcased his preoccupation with manufacturing a new poetic language, an obscure yet accurate style of mellifluously articulating our responses to enlivening experiences and discouraging concerns.
This week’s poem is one of Crane’s earliest publications. My Grandmother’s Love Letters narrates Crane’s time rifling through old boxes in his deceased grandmother’s attic. When he discovers his late grandparent’s most intimate correspondence, he is afforded a deep and serious insight into her psychology. Still, he understands that a true comprehension of another person’s inner world is likely impossible.
It reminds me of the philosopher Hegel’s alleged last words – “only one man ever understood me…and he didn’t really understand me”.
We hope you enjoy this week’s poem as much as we did.
My Grandmother’s Love Letters (1920)
There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.
There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.
Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.
And I ask myself:
“Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?”
Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.