Robed in the Long Friends: The Haunting of Hart Crane’s “Quaker Hill”
I see only the ideal. But no ideals have ever been fully successful on this earth.
— ISADORA DUNCAN
The gentian weaves her fringes,
The maple’s loom is red.
— EMILY DICKINSON
Hart Crane’s epigraph to the “Quaker Hill” section of The Bridge invokes two personal avatars of a frustrated artistic idealism. Isadora Duncan’s belief that “no ideals have ever been fully successful on this earth” partners her, in Crane’s conception, with Emily Dickinson, who elsewhere in his oeuvre is portrayed as having “fed her hunger like an endless task” before achieving only a stillness “least sought for.” Crane’s pained awareness — evident in his correspondence — of the likely futility of achieving his modern epic with bridge as keynote symbol, provides a psychological “bridge” from past to present, uniting Dickinson with Duncan, and both with Crane, in the Quaker Hill setting of Pawling, New York.
Here, the contrast between modern enterprise and the lost idealism of Quaker forefathers invites an omnificent elegy and prayer. But the poem's force derives less from these concerns than from Crane's seamless interplay of past and present tense across nine verses: it's this technical element that sustains the elegiac power and the eerily perennial atmosphere of “Quaker Hill.”
The opening line, “Perspective never withers from their eyes,” unites the poem's subjects with a profound associative resonance. While “their” refers literally to the present-day cattle, grazing oblivious to changing seasons, Crane’s speaker deliberately withholds this information for three lines, teasing out its suggestiveness. In opening the possessive pronoun to figures invoked in the poem’s epigraph, Crane implies these creators “see no other thing/ Than grass and snow, and their own inner being.” The idealistic artist, Crane proposes, ignores external matters as urgent as the changing seasons, though it means his own malnourishment, “though they should thin and die on last year’s stubble.” This aligns with Duncan’s statement on the incompatibility of ideal visions and everyday reality. Conjuring these figures, Crane implicates them and himself in the oblivion of grazing cattle: amid all its gestures of elegy and yearning, "Quaker Hill" satirizes a creator's myopia.
In this context, the seemingly short backward look to last year takes on a much longer symbolic resonance. Its past tense symbolically stretches to include earlier ages, earlier artistic traditions. By the same token, the “seasons fleeting” in present tense are not merely literal seasons but changing epochs. Further, Crane suggests only that such beings should thin and die: not that they did, or do, and the “never” temporally suspends them.
This rhetorical strategy creates an effect of ghostly superimposition in the setting of Quaker Hill, where “resigned factions of the dead preside.” Historical presences are given vital living tense—indeed, “what cunning neighbors history has in fine!” the speaker exclaims in stanza six. The current inhabitants are we “who would, ourselves, stalk down the merriest ghost” (second stanza). The merry ghosts are not only hypothetical but also refer to the actual Quakers, who take the current inhabitants by the hand with the modal verb “would” to exist hand in hand in a state of indeterminate possibility. The interplay of past and present is used to both elegiac and ironic effect: “This was the Promised Land, and still is/ To the persuasive suburban land agent/ In bootleg roadhouses,” Crane’s speaker sardonically notes. This dual effect of elegy-satire is pushed to the limit in the closing lines of stanza six, where
Fresh from the radio in the old Meeting House
(Now the New Avalon Hotel) volcanoes roar
A welcome to highsteppers that no mouse
Who saw the Friends there ever heard before.
But surely the poem's most astonishing act of rhetorical hopscotch between past and present tense occurs in the eighth stanza: “Dead rangers bled their comfort on the snow;/ But I must ask slain Iroquois to guide/ Me farther than scalped Yankees knew to go.” In these lines, the speaker’s present and history’s past, already tense in their adjacency, find further complications of chronology nestled within them. The Iroquois guides are slain, but will be summoned to escort the speaker through an uncertain present. Yet if, as juxtaposition suggests, the Iroquois were slain by the Yankees, the Yankees have also been “scalped,” so it remains unclear in this construction what happened when, or who slew whom more triumphantly, although we know the historical outcome. For Crane’s speaker, the literal temporality of these figures is less important than their symbolic significance. The Iroquois embody an alternate knowledge to that of the Yankees, one that will take him “farther,” and so this speaker adds them to a circle of Friends already comprising Duncan, Dickinson and the Quakers, as additional spirit guides, escorts toward the future.
The final two stanzas clarify the role of these spectral ushers. They inspire Crane's speaker into an “angelus,’ or song of incarnation, guided by the idealism of the Iroquois and Quakers but especially informed by “the pain that Emily, that Isadora knew!” –that is, the pain of feeding creative hunger like an endless task. This song may “break the heart,” but it also “saves,” and perhaps most importantly, yields
That patience that is armour and that shields
Love from despair—when love forsees the end–
Leaf after autumnal leaf
break off,
descend–
descend–
Turning outward from the inner ideal provides a vision of ephemerality, such that none of the speaker's conjurations of past into present expect the fulfillment of a destination. The poem breaks off in present tense, in mid-syntax, with an image of descending leaves that recalls the opening stanza’s “August Antarctic skies” and “seasons fleeting.” Crane closes the associative loop.
In “Quaker Hill,” presences are not so much portrayed as suggested, in a spectral interplay of modal verbs, varying tenses, and layerings of context, with a dexterity that renders the whole weave dense but seamless. Readers most explicitly acquaint the self-satisfied livestock that “see no other thing” than what is most vital to sustain “their inner being,” and ironically achieve a kind of eternity, in that “perspective never withers from their eyes.”
In Crane’s later work “To Emily Dickinson,” his speaker tells Dicksinson that “truly, no flower yet withers in your hand.” Dickinson, above other spirits invoked, is Crane's high priestess of paradoxical suspension in the pursuit of his transcendent ideal. Why invoke such friends as these? “Else tears heap all within one clay-cold hill.”
I see only the ideal. But no ideals have ever been fully successful on this earth.
— ISADORA DUNCAN
The gentian weaves her fringes,
The maple’s loom is red.
— EMILY DICKINSON
Hart Crane’s epigraph to the “Quaker Hill” section of The Bridge invokes two personal avatars of a frustrated artistic idealism. Isadora Duncan’s belief that “no ideals have ever been fully successful on this earth” partners her, in Crane’s conception, with Emily Dickinson, who elsewhere in his oeuvre is portrayed as having “fed her hunger like an endless task” before achieving only a stillness “least sought for.” Crane’s pained awareness — evident in his correspondence — of the likely futility of achieving his modern epic with bridge as keynote symbol, provides a psychological “bridge” from past to present, uniting Dickinson with Duncan, and both with Crane, in the Quaker Hill setting of Pawling, New York.
Here, the contrast between modern enterprise and the lost idealism of Quaker forefathers invites an omnificent elegy and prayer. But the poem's force derives less from these concerns than from Crane's seamless interplay of past and present tense across nine verses: it's this technical element that sustains the elegiac power and the eerily perennial atmosphere of “Quaker Hill.”
The opening line, “Perspective never withers from their eyes,” unites the poem's subjects with a profound associative resonance. While “their” refers literally to the present-day cattle, grazing oblivious to changing seasons, Crane’s speaker deliberately withholds this information for three lines, teasing out its suggestiveness. In opening the possessive pronoun to figures invoked in the poem’s epigraph, Crane implies these creators “see no other thing/ Than grass and snow, and their own inner being.” The idealistic artist, Crane proposes, ignores external matters as urgent as the changing seasons, though it means his own malnourishment, “though they should thin and die on last year’s stubble.” This aligns with Duncan’s statement on the incompatibility of ideal visions and everyday reality. Conjuring these figures, Crane implicates them and himself in the oblivion of grazing cattle: amid all its gestures of elegy and yearning, "Quaker Hill" satirizes a creator's myopia.
In this context, the seemingly short backward look to last year takes on a much longer symbolic resonance. Its past tense symbolically stretches to include earlier ages, earlier artistic traditions. By the same token, the “seasons fleeting” in present tense are not merely literal seasons but changing epochs. Further, Crane suggests only that such beings should thin and die: not that they did, or do, and the “never” temporally suspends them.
This rhetorical strategy creates an effect of ghostly superimposition in the setting of Quaker Hill, where “resigned factions of the dead preside.” Historical presences are given vital living tense—indeed, “what cunning neighbors history has in fine!” the speaker exclaims in stanza six. The current inhabitants are we “who would, ourselves, stalk down the merriest ghost” (second stanza). The merry ghosts are not only hypothetical but also refer to the actual Quakers, who take the current inhabitants by the hand with the modal verb “would” to exist hand in hand in a state of indeterminate possibility. The interplay of past and present is used to both elegiac and ironic effect: “This was the Promised Land, and still is/ To the persuasive suburban land agent/ In bootleg roadhouses,” Crane’s speaker sardonically notes. This dual effect of elegy-satire is pushed to the limit in the closing lines of stanza six, where
Fresh from the radio in the old Meeting House
(Now the New Avalon Hotel) volcanoes roar
A welcome to highsteppers that no mouse
Who saw the Friends there ever heard before.
But surely the poem's most astonishing act of rhetorical hopscotch between past and present tense occurs in the eighth stanza: “Dead rangers bled their comfort on the snow;/ But I must ask slain Iroquois to guide/ Me farther than scalped Yankees knew to go.” In these lines, the speaker’s present and history’s past, already tense in their adjacency, find further complications of chronology nestled within them. The Iroquois guides are slain, but will be summoned to escort the speaker through an uncertain present. Yet if, as juxtaposition suggests, the Iroquois were slain by the Yankees, the Yankees have also been “scalped,” so it remains unclear in this construction what happened when, or who slew whom more triumphantly, although we know the historical outcome. For Crane’s speaker, the literal temporality of these figures is less important than their symbolic significance. The Iroquois embody an alternate knowledge to that of the Yankees, one that will take him “farther,” and so this speaker adds them to a circle of Friends already comprising Duncan, Dickinson and the Quakers, as additional spirit guides, escorts toward the future.
The final two stanzas clarify the role of these spectral ushers. They inspire Crane's speaker into an “angelus,’ or song of incarnation, guided by the idealism of the Iroquois and Quakers but especially informed by “the pain that Emily, that Isadora knew!” –that is, the pain of feeding creative hunger like an endless task. This song may “break the heart,” but it also “saves,” and perhaps most importantly, yields
That patience that is armour and that shields
Love from despair—when love forsees the end–
Leaf after autumnal leaf
break off,
descend–
descend–
Turning outward from the inner ideal provides a vision of ephemerality, such that none of the speaker's conjurations of past into present expect the fulfillment of a destination. The poem breaks off in present tense, in mid-syntax, with an image of descending leaves that recalls the opening stanza’s “August Antarctic skies” and “seasons fleeting.” Crane closes the associative loop.
In “Quaker Hill,” presences are not so much portrayed as suggested, in a spectral interplay of modal verbs, varying tenses, and layerings of context, with a dexterity that renders the whole weave dense but seamless. Readers most explicitly acquaint the self-satisfied livestock that “see no other thing” than what is most vital to sustain “their inner being,” and ironically achieve a kind of eternity, in that “perspective never withers from their eyes.”
In Crane’s later work “To Emily Dickinson,” his speaker tells Dicksinson that “truly, no flower yet withers in your hand.” Dickinson, above other spirits invoked, is Crane's high priestess of paradoxical suspension in the pursuit of his transcendent ideal. Why invoke such friends as these? “Else tears heap all within one clay-cold hill.”