Four Poems by Hart Crane (2024)
Tenor, harp. 9 min. ca.
The composer writes: the American poet Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, in 1899, and spent much of his (short) adult life in New York City. He was much influenced by the modernist style of T.S. Eliot, and is best known for his epic poem, The Bridge. He died in an apparent suicide, jumping from a ship in the Gulf of Mexico in 1932.
The four poems I have chosen to set to music were written by Crane in the 1920s.
TEXT
I: Forgetfulness
Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, --
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.
Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, — or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, — white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.
I can remember much forgetfulness.
II: Garden Abstract
The apple on its bough is her desire--
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.
And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
The wind possessing her—weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.
III: October-November
Indian-summer-sun
With crimson feathers whips away the mists, --
Dives through the filter of trellises
And gilds the silver on the blotched arbor-seats.
Now gold and purple scintillate
On trees that seem dancing
In delirium ;
Then the moon
In a mad orange flare
Floods the grape-hung night
IV: My Grandmother’s Love Letters
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.
The composer writes: the American poet Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, in 1899, and spent much of his (short) adult life in New York City. He was much influenced by the modernist style of T.S. Eliot, and is best known for his epic poem, The Bridge. He died in an apparent suicide, jumping from a ship in the Gulf of Mexico in 1932.
The four poems I have chosen to set to music were written by Crane in the 1920s.
TEXT
I: Forgetfulness
Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, --
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.
Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, — or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, — white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.
I can remember much forgetfulness.
II: Garden Abstract
The apple on its bough is her desire--
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.
And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
The wind possessing her—weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.
III: October-November
Indian-summer-sun
With crimson feathers whips away the mists, --
Dives through the filter of trellises
And gilds the silver on the blotched arbor-seats.
Now gold and purple scintillate
On trees that seem dancing
In delirium ;
Then the moon
In a mad orange flare
Floods the grape-hung night
IV: My Grandmother’s Love Letters
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.
