[lit-ideas] Chaplinesque by Hart Crane

  • From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 24 Apr 2005 21:02:42 -0400

*Chaplinesque*

by Hart Crane


We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint of that innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than pirouettes of any pliant cane:
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart lives on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

_______

See _Chaplin, My Autobiography_, p. 266: "[Hart Crane and I] discussed 
the purpose of poetry. I said it was a love letter to the world. ‘A very 
small world,’ said Hart ruefully."

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