0.1 Afterword

on the horizon the peaks assembled;

and as i looked,

the march of the mountains began.

and as they marched, they sang,

“aye! we come! we come!”

Like Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm,” number V unfolds a symbolic drama about the contradictory forces unleashed in poetic creation. Its import, however, is much closer to Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the “Printing House” Blake reveals in Plate 15. The struggle raised by the man’s rage for order in number V is very like thestruggle between the forces of Blake’s “Prolific” (“ those who would not stand in rows ”) and “Devourer” (“ those who pined to stand in rows ”). Where Blake gives a comic inflection to this struggle, Crane’s view is much darker (“ the man went to death, weeping ”) —though of course for Crane, “ the darkness ” is his proper visionary environment, the land of the Black Riders.

The connections that function across the field of The Black Riders are often as clear as those that reach back from number V to number I, or as indirect—and less immediate—as the relation of “ the desert ” in number III to the “ burning sand ” in number XXI and “ the sand ” of number LXV. Or consider the relation of the “ bloody scuffle ” of number V and its “ quarrel, world-wide ”:

it endured for ages;

and blood was shed

And then observe the bibliographical inflection this is given in number XLVI:

many red devils ran from my heart

and out upon the page.

they were so tiny

the pen could mash them.

and many struggled in the ink.

Crane’s lines are plainly inflected with what Blake called “the Voice of the Devil.” While that voice comes in various tones—mocking and defiant, defeated and bewildered, intimateand sympathetic—all struggle for expression in the ink.

Iii

That basic figural form led Crane to the title he chose for his book. But the figure carried an expressive demand that Crane himself was inno position to meet. Black Riders is a remarkable achievement because the expressive demand implicit in Crane’s writing was only fulfilled when Copeland and Daysupplied it with an adequate graphical exponent. The book’s impersonality, so to speak, is fulfilled in an interpretive-graphic design it acquires indirectly, from a non-authorial source.

The historical significance of that situation is impossible to overstate. It clearly forecasts the twentieth century’s emphasis on “the reader’s part” in the construction ofmeaning. Before the coming of the reader, The Poet will think: “ i was in the darkness;/ i could not see my words. ” From elsewhere comes an illumination, signs of meaning expressed in words now made visible to The Poet. But in Crane’s horizon, these great lights are themselves darkeningsigns— black riders drawing The Poet back into the prolific darkness. This return brings a visible, literal darkness—the typographical signs emerging in the whitedesert of the page—where The Poet can now see his words clearly for what they are: a darkness calling to another darkness, writer to reader, creator to re-creator.