by James Geary
Before going on to clarify his poem, Crane cited two other poets, William Blake and T. S. Eliot, in his defense. He asked how Blake could possibly say, “a sigh is a sword of an Angel King427” or how Eliot could believe “Every street lamp that I pass beats like a fatalistic drum,” both images from famous poems of which Monroe presumably approved. Crane believed that associative leaps like these—from sighs to swords, from street lamps to drums, from frosted eyes to lifted altars—were essential to poetry and, indeed, to all creative thought. He wrote to Monroe:
As a poet I may very possibly be more interested428 in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations . . . [A metaphor’s] apparent illogic operates so logically in conjunction with its context in the poem as to establish its claim to another logic.
Crane called this other logic the “logic of metaphor429.”
The logic of metaphor is the logic of our lives. Metaphor impinges on everything, allowing us—poets and non-poets alike—to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways. Metaphor is the bridge we fling between the utterly strange and the utterly familiar, between dice and drowned men’s bones, between I and an other.
People have lived along the banks of the Thames for tens of thousands of years, more or less as long as there have been people. The place where they settled in the greatest numbers, though, has only been known as London for a couple thousand years.
The Thames is a blunt, muscular river that meanders through the city in wide leisurely arcs before merging with the North Sea. Like all rivers, it is both a lifeline and a timeline. For millennia, the Thames has afforded Londoners a living and preserved a record of their lives. Prehistoric stone tools, Bronze and Iron Age metalwork, old boots and discarded bicycles, human and animal bones—all the treasure and debris of human life—have been fished from its waters, forming its bequest to us. The Thames is, as British politician John Burns described it, “liquid history.”
But London is actually riddled with rivers; the Thames is just the biggest. There are about a dozen others running through the city, smaller streams that have long been forgotten as London has grown from a parcel of separate villages into a major metropolis. In his Survey of London, published in 1598, historian John Stow wrote of the Walbrooke, which still flows secretly under The City, London’s financial district:
This water-course, having divers bridges430, was afterwards vaulted over with brick, and paved level with the streets and lanes where through it passed; and since that, also houses have been built thereon, so that the course of the Walbrooke is now hidden underground, and thereby hardly known.
A tributary of one of London’s lost rivers flows under my street. Several hundred years ago, the river darted along the place where I live now, then an open field dotted with ponds. Up until the early nineteenth century, people fished in it, a pastime commemorated in the etymology of a nearby street name: Anglers Lane. Then, somewhere along the line, the river started to sink. People built next to, on top of, and over it. They diverted it into gullies and ditches.
But however people tried to deflect it, the river just kept coming. So, rather than fight it, they funneled it into pipes laid along its natural course and submerged those beneath new roads and homes. The river retreated underground. People lost track of it.
Now it only surfaces during heavy rains, when it percolates into people’s basements or bursts its buried banks and streams into the street, turning it once more into a river.
This is how the river, like a long-forgotten metaphor, reminds us that it’s still there, even though we can’t see it; that it’s still fleet, still flowing, and knows exactly where it’s going.
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