The Hart Crane Panel

This is part of a poem titled My Grandmother's Love Letters from Hart Crane's collection of lyrics, White Buildings (1926). The poem begins "There are no stars out tonight / but those of memory." The mysterious "I" that narrates the poem seems hopeless, without light and love. The only comfort he can find, the only light, seems to be in his memory. In the second stanza, the reader realizes what kind of thoughts the narrator seems to cherish: thoughts and artifacts of his grandmother. But all of this remains extremely delicate. Such memories are "liable to melt as snow." The third stanza reinforces the delicate nature of his memories. There is a temporal distance that removes the narrator from the love and light of his grandmother--"It is all hung by an invisible white hair." Then the narrator presents the passage which means so much to me. He asks himself whether he is capable of reaching back to his grandmother. To me, this is symbolic of my search for the Heavenly Mother. I must as myself, as the narrator of the poem does, "Are my fingers long enough to play old keys that are but echoes?" I realize, as Crane does, that I face an immense struggle. "And so I stumble."