THE BROKEN TOWER - HART CRANE

The Broken Tower - Hart Crane

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn

Displaces me as though I dropped down the knell

Of a spent day – to wander the cathedral lawn

From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

knell: death knell

Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps

Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway

Antiphonal carillons launched before

The stars are caught and hived in the sun’s ray?

carillons: a tune played on bells

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;

And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave

Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score

Of broken intervals… and I, their sexton slave!

sexton: a person whose job is to take care of a church and its surroundings and ring the church bells

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping

The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!

Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles out leaping—

O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain! …

encyclicals: an official letter written by the Pope and sent to all Roman Catholic Bishops

canyons: a deep valley with steep sides of rock

impasse: dead lock. Does not come to an agreement

pagodas: a temple (a religious building)

campaniles: a tower that contain a bell

reveilles: a tune that is played to wake soldiers in the morning

And so it was I entered the broken world

To trace the visionary company of love, its voice

An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)

But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored

Of that tribunal monarch of the air

Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word

In wounds pledged once to hope—cleft to despair?

The steep encroachments of my blood left me

No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower

As flings the question true?) – or is it she

Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?—

And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes

My veins recall and add, revived and sure

The angelus of wars my chest evokes:

What I hold healed, original now, and pure …

angelus: (in the Roman Catholic Church) prayers said in the morning, at midday and in the evening; a bell rung when it is time for these prayers.

And builds, within, a tower that is not stone

(Not stone can jacket heaven)—but slip

Of pebbles—visible wings of silence sown

In azure circles, widening as they dip

The matrix if the heart, lift down the eye

That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…

The commodious, tall decorum of the sky

Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

matrix: prevailing conditions/ surrounding substance/ atmosphere/environment

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