Free Poems That Make Grown Men Cry by Anthony and Ben Holden Page A

the tall soldiers drumming by.
     
    But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
    And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent,
    We spell away the overhanging night,
    We spell away the soldiers and the fright.
     
    There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
    Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
    We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
    In brininess and volubility.
     
    But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
    Throwing off language and its watery clasp
    Before our death, instead of when death comes,
    Facing the wide glareof the children’s day,
    Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
    We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.
    (1940)

    John Sutherland (b. 1938) is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature at University College, London. Among his many books are the Stanford
Companion
to Victorian Fiction
(1989, rev. 2009),a series of ‘puzzles in classic fiction’ entitled
Is Heathcliff a Murderer?
(1996),
Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?
(1997) and
Who
Betrays Elizabeth Bennett?
(1999), as well as the authorised life of Stephen Spender (2004),
Lives of the Novelists
(2011) and two volumes of autobiography,
Last Drink to LA
(2001) and
The Boy Who Loved Books
(2007). His most recent work is
Jumbo,
an ‘unauthorised’ biographyof Jumbo the Elephant (2014).

The Broken Tower
    HART CRANE (1899–1932)

    HAROLD BLOOM
    This poem is Hart Crane’s farewell to the art of poetry, which was his life. I do not know another poem like it, despite its packed allusiveness. There are parallels of
equal distinction: Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day’, Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, Blake’s ‘The Mental Traveller’, Shelley’s‘Ode to the West Wind’, Whitman’s ‘As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life’.
    Crane desperately needed reassurance that he was still a poet, but it was not forthcoming. His suicide [at the age of thirty-two] perhaps would have come even if he had been persuaded that his
great gifts were intact. He had been doom-eager all his life.
    The Broken Tower
    The bell-rope that gathersGod at dawn
    Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
    Of a spent day – to wander the cathedral lawn
     
    From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.
    Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
    Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
    Antiphonal carillons launched before
    The stars are caught and hived in thesun’s ray?
     
    The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
    And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
    Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
    Of broken intervals . . . And I, their sexton slave!
     
    Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
    The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
    Pagodas, campanileswith reveilles outleaping –
    O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain! . . .
     
    And so it was I entered the broken world
    To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
    An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
    But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
     
    My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
    Of that tribunalmonarch of the air
    Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
    In wounds pledged once to hope, – cleft to despair?
     
    The steep encroachments of my blood left me
    No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
    As flings the question true?) – or is it she
    Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power? –
     
    And through whose pulseI hear, counting the strokes
    My veins recall and add, revived and sure
    The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
    What I hold healed, original now, and pure . . .
     
    And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
    (Not stone can jacket heaven) – but slip
    Of pebbles, – visible wings of silence sown
    In azure circles, widening as they dip
     
    The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye
    That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower . . .
    The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
    Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its