Love Letters

Next week being finals week, I think I'm going to stay with Hart Crane, because finals week always makes me want to sail to the Gulf of Mexico (and jump off the ship once I'm there).  In fact, I'll probably keep posting stuff by Hart Crane until I know my grades in all of the classes I'm taking this semester.

Here's the famous fourth poem in Hart Crane's first book ("White Buildings", published 1926):
_____________________________________
My Grandmother's Love Letters

By Harold Hart Crane

There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble.  And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.