Through the bound cable strands, the arching path Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,— Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate The whispered rush, telepathy of wires. Up the index of night, granite and steel— Transparent meshes—fleckless the gleaming staves— Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream As though a god were issue of the strings. . . . And through that cordage, threading with its call One arc synoptic of all tides below— Their labyrinthine mouths of history Pouring reply as though all ships at sea Complighted in one vibrant breath made cry,— “Make thy love sure—to weave whose song we ply!” —From black embankments, moveless soundings hailed, So seven oceans answer from their dream. And on, obliquely up bright carrier bars New octaves trestle the twin monoliths Beyond whose frosted capes the moon bequeaths Two worlds of sleep (O arching strands of song!)— Onward and up the crystal-flooded aisle White tempest nets file upward, upward ring With silver terraces the humming spars, The loft of vision, palladium helm of stars. Sheerly the eyes, like seagulls stung with rime— Slit and propelled by glistening fins of light— Pick biting way up towering looms that press Sidelong with flight of blade on tendon blade —Tomorrows into yesteryear—and link What cipher-script of time no traveller reads But who, through smoking pyres of love and death, Searches the timeless laugh of mythic spears. Like hails, farewells—up planet-sequined heights Some trillion whispering hammers glimmer Tyre: Serenely, sharply up the long anvil cry Of inchling aeons silence rivets Troy. And you, aloft there—Jason! hesting Shout! Still wrapping harness to the swarming air! Silvery the rushing wake, surpassing call, Beams yelling Aeolus! splintered in the straits! From gulfs unfolding, terrible of drums, Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, tensely spare— Bridge, lifting night to cycloramic crest Of deepest day—O Choir, translating time Into what multitudinous Verb the suns And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast In myriad syllables,—Psalm of Cathay! O Love, thy white, pervasive Paradigm . . . ! We left the haven hanging in the night Sheened harbor lanterns backward fled the keel. Pacific here at time’s end, bearing corn,— Eyes stammer through the pangs of dust and steel. And still the circular, indubitable frieze Of heaven’s meditation, yoking wave To kneeling wave, one song devoutly binds— The vernal strophe chimes from deathless strings! O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits The agile precincts of the lark’s return; Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing In single chrysalis the many twain,— Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom— Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time’s realm As love strikes clear direction for the helm. Swift peal of secular light, intrinsic Myth Whose fell unshadow is death’s utter wound,— O River-throated—iridescently upborne Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins; With white escarpments swinging into light, Sustained in tears the cities are endowed And justified conclamant with ripe fields Revolving through their harvests in sweet torment. Forever Deity’s glittering Pledge, O Thou Whose canticle fresh chemistry assigns To wrapt inception and beatitude,— Always through blinding cables, to our joy, Of thy white seizure springs the prophecy: Always through spiring cordage, pyramids Of silver sequel, Deity’s young name Kinetic of white choiring wings . . . ascends. Migrations that must needs void memory, Inventions that cobblestone the heart,— Unspeakable Thou Bridge to Thee, O Love. Thy pardon for this history, whitest Flower, O Answerer of all,—Anemone,— Now while thy petals spend the suns about us, hold— (O Thou whose radiance doth inherit me) Atlantis,—hold thy floating singer late! So to thine Everpresence, beyond time, Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star That bleeds infinity—the orphic strings, Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge: —One Song, one Bridge of Fire! Is it Cathay, Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring The serpent with the eagle in the leaves. . . . ? Whispers antiphonal in azure swing.

O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits The agile precincts of the lark’s return; Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing In single chrysalis the many twain,— Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom—  Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time’s realm As love strikes clear direction for the helm.

- “Atlantis,” The Bridge, Hart Crane

The Brooklyn Bridge at night, John Francis Strauss