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O Carib Isle!

By Hart Crane 1899–1932 Hart Crane

O Carib Isle!

The tarantula rattling at the lily’s foot

Across the feet of the dead, laid in white sand

Near the coral beach—nor zigzag fiddle crabs

Side-stilting from the path (that shift, subvert

And anagrammatize your name)—No, nothing here

Below the palsy that one eucalyptus lifts

In wrinkled shadows—mourns.

And yet suppose

I count these nacreous frames of tropic death,

Brutal necklaces of shells around each grave

Squared off so carefully. Then

To the white sand I may speak a name, fertile

Albeit in a stranger tongue. Tree names, flower names

Deliberate, gainsay death’s brittle crypt. Meanwhile

The wind that knots itself in one great death—

Coils and withdraws. So syllables want breath.

But where is the Captain of this doubloon isle

Without a turnstile? Who but catchword crabs

Patrols the dry groins of the underbrush?

What man, or What

Is Commissioner of mildew throughout the ambushed senses?

His Carib mathematics web the eyes’ baked lenses!

Under the poinciana, of a noon or afternoon

Let fiery blossoms clot the light, render my ghost

Sieved upward, white and black along the air

Until it meets the blue’s comedian host.

Let not the pilgrim see himself again

For slow evisceration bound like those huge terrapin

Each daybreak on the wharf, their brine-caked eyes;

—Spiked, overturned; such thunder in their strain!

And clenched beaks coughing for the surge again!

Slagged of the hurricane—I, cast within its flow,

Congeal by afternoons here, satin and vacant.

You have given me the shell, Satan,—carbonic amulet

Sere of the sun exploded in the sea.

Hart Crane, "O Carib Isle!" from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, edited by Marc SImon. Copyright © 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1986 by Marc Simon. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing.

Source: Poetry (October 1927).

Biography

Hart Crane is a legendary figure among American poets. In his personal life he showed little self-esteem, indulging in great and frequent bouts of alcohol abuse. In his art, however, he showed surprising optimism. Critics have contended that for Crane, misery and despair were redeemed through the apprehension of beauty, and in some of his greatest verses he articulated his own quest for redemption. He also believed strongly in . . .

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