CAMELOT FANTASIES

—  Voyages


by Hart Crane



 I

 Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
 Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
 They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
 And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
 Gaily digging and scattering.

 And in answer to their treble interjections
 The sun beats lightning on the waves,
 The waves fold thunder on the sand;
 And could they hear me I would tell them:

 O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
 Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
 By time and the elements; but there is a line
 You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
 Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
 Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
 The bottom of the sea is cruel.

 II

—And yet this great wink of eternity,
 Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
 Samite sheeted and processioned where
 Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
 Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

 Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
 On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
 The sceptred 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, O my Prodigal,
 Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

 Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
 And hasten while her penniless rich palms
 Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,—
Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire,
 Close round one instant in one floating flower.

 Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
 O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
 Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
 Is answered in the vortex of our grave
 The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

 III

 Infinite consanguinity it bears—
This tendered theme of you that light
 Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
 Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
 While ribboned water lanes I wind
 Are laved and scattered with no stroke
 Wide from your side, whereto this hour
 The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.

 And so, admitted through black swollen gates
 That must arrest all distance otherwise,—
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
 Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
 Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
 Your body rocking!
 and where death, if shed,
 Presumes no carnage, but this single change,—
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
 The silken skilled transmemberment of song;

 Permit me voyage, love, into your hands ...

 IV

 Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose
 I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge
 Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings
 Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe
 Chilled albatross’s white immutability)
 No stream of greater love advancing now
 Than, singing, this mortality alone
 Through clay aflow immortally to you.

 All fragrance irrefragably, and claim
 Madly meeting logically in this hour
 And region that is ours to wreathe again,
 Portending eyes and lips and making told
 The chancel port and portion of our June—

Shall they not stem and close in our own steps
 Bright staves of flowers and quills today as I
 Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?

 In signature of the incarnate word
 The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling
 Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown
 And widening noon within your breast for gathering
 All bright insinuations that my years have caught
 For islands where must lead inviolably
 Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,—

In this expectant, still exclaim receive
 The secret oar and petals of all love.

 V

 Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,
 Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast
 Together in one merciless white blade—
The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.

—As if too brittle or too clear to touch!
 The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,
 Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.
 One frozen trackless smile ... What words
 Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we

 Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword
 Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge,
 Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved
 And changed ... “There’s

 Nothing like this in the world,” you say,
 Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look
 Too, into that godless cleft of sky
 Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing.

“—And never to quite understand!” No,
 In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed
 Nothing so flagless as this piracy.

 But now
 Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.
 Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;
 Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
 Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.

 VI

 Where icy and bright dungeons lift
 Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,
 And ocean rivers, churning, shift
 Green borders under stranger skies,

 Steadily as a shell secretes
 Its beating leagues of monotone,
 Or as many waters trough the sun’s
 Red kelson past the cape’s wet stone;

 O rivers mingling toward the sky
 And harbor of the phoenix’ breast—
My eyes pressed black against the prow,
—Thy derelict and blinded guest

 Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke,
 I cannot claim: let thy waves rear
 More savage than the death of kings,
 Some splintered garland for the seer.

 Beyond siroccos harvesting
 The solstice thunders, crept away,
 Like a cliff swinging or a sail
 Flung into April’s inmost day—

Creation’s blithe and petalled word
 To the lounged goddess when she rose
 Conceding dialogue with eyes
 That smile unsearchable repose—

Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle,
—Unfolded floating dais before
 Which rainbows twine continual hair—
Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!

 The imaged Word, it is, that holds
 Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
 It is the unbetrayable reply
 Whose accent no farewell can know.



Hart Crane's "Voyages" may be the best love poem of all time, and the second-best love poem isn't even close. Hart Crane was an "uneven" poet who sometimes borders on being unreadable, but in his best poems, he is a wonder. Other poems of his such as "To Brooklyn Bridge" and "The Broken Tower" rank with the best poems in the English language.