0.1 Afterword  (Page 5/9)

once i saw mountains angry,

and ranged in battle front. (XXII)

i walked in a desert.

and i cried,

"ah, god, take me from this place!"

a voice said, " it is no desert."

i cried, "well, but —

the sand, the heat, the vacant horizon."

a voice said, "it is no desert." (XLII)

The last selection—number XLII—illustrates another of the book’s special poetic effects. The marriage of Crane’s hieratic prose-poetic style with its bibliographical presentationproduces some crucial symbolic relations. The “ desert ” of number III recurs through the sequence both literally and in various waste-place transformations. This “ desert ” emerges as a figure for the territory of all the lines in the book—and ultimately gets indexed by the paper on which the printedlines of black riders make their appearances. XLII suggests that Crane’s bleak landscapes actually reveal the presence of a living world hidden from ordinary view. In The Black Riders we are to discover a new order of visible darkness.

i was in the darkness;

i could not see my words

nor the wishes of my heart.

then suddenly there was a great light –

"let me into the darkness again."

A particularly interesting transformation of the “ desert ” motif comes in number LXV:

once, i knew a fine song,

– it is true, believe me,–

it was all of birds,

and i held them in a basket;

when i opened the wicket,

heavens! they all flew away.

i cried, "come back, little thoughts!"

but they only laughed.

they flew on

until they were as sand

thrown between me and the sky.

In number II these song birds mocked the man who thought he could sing. Here the difference between the poet as lector and poet as scriptor shifts to a new revelation. The escaping birds undergo a double transformation: from grains of desert sand that obscure the air they mutate, at a second orderof symbolic form, to suggest a night sky scattered with stars.

In an important sense, the whole of Crane’s book is addressing the problem of poetic expression as it ispassing into the age of mechanical reproduction. Number IV exhibits the problem in a splendid little gnomic expression:

yes, i have a thousand tongues,

and nine and ninety-nine lie.

though i strive to use the one,

it will make no melody at my will,

but is dead in my mouth.

The lines are a kind of riddle defining the non-lyrical, non-subjective character of the texts we read in Crane’s book.Like the “I” of number III, the “speaker” of these lines is a kind of impersonality—in this case, not an Everyman but The Poet reflecting on his emergent historical crisis, which is symbolically figuredin the typographical representation of the death of the subjective poet (“ my will ”) and his lyric forms (“ my mouth ”).

Number V completes the book’s introductory sequence of lines. The text pivots around the conflicts raised by “ a man ” who issues a Zarathustrian command: “ range me all men of the world in rows. ” A “ terrific clamor ” follows, echoing “ the clash and clang ” of number I even as the rows are recalling the lines of black riders ranged for march and struggle, like the mountains of number XXXVIII: