#3: Hart Crane’s “Garden Abstract”
A critique of republican democracy & its mythic Judeo -Christian roots, plus notes on Spoonie Press, Poetology's Youtube channel, and Five Minutes with Dan Nielsen
Garden Abstract
The apple on its bough is her desire,— Shining suspension, mimic of the sun. The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice, Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes. She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers. And so she comes to dream herself the tree, The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins, Holding her to the sky and its quick blue, Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight. She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.
Superficially a poem about a woman desiring an apple on a tree in a garden, Hart Crane’s “Garden Abstract,” was first published in The Little Review in 1920. I re-read this twelve line poem of mostly 10 syllables lines with somewhere between 3 and 6 accents each a few times here in 2022, while my children attended an open gymnastics hour and I wrung my hands over whether women will have a right to make their own medical decisions.
While the pattern it elaborates indeed resembles the figure of woman who comes to be called Eve in the second account of creation in Genesis, Crane’s poem speaks to, deconstructs and elaborates a myth central to our culture and its marginalization of women, even as it levels an incisive criticism about the magically delusive power of political hegemony. Bear in mind that Congress passed the 19th amendment on June 4, 1919. It was ratified on August 18, 1920, so women’s suffrage was very much of the political moment.
As if to mimic the suspension of the fruit — both in the sense of being withheld and if being held up or hung — the iambic pentameter, too, is suspended from the second to the fourth line. Where Crane has the apple imitate the sun, he veers from the pattern established by Genesis and invokes a pattern of allusions to the source of truth as it figures in Plato’s Republic, which blinds those who crawl out from the cave of imitations. Likewise, philosophy as a whole and Plato in particular — not the first book of Jewish or Christian scripture primarily — concern themselves with mimicry as a central theme.
Insofar as the poem patterns itself off Genesis, the fruit here is a product of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. That is to say the fruit is both made by and brings about in those who eat of it moral knowledge — or knowledge of moral categories. To this, Crane pairs the same paradox hidden beneath Genesis: that the woman’s desire for the fruit — her aesthetic appetite as well as her gustatory instincts — amount to a knowledge that compels her to action.
It’s not difficult to read this simultaneously as an allegory for women’s enfranchisement, with the her right to vote being “her voice” caught up in the tree while she is breathless, chasing the legislative, executive and judicial “branches” that support what she desired until they blur her very view of them.
Like Ariel in Shakespeare’s , she finds herself imprisoned in the tree. Instead of Prospero ensorcelling her, the tree that bears the fruit she desires has such hypnotic power intrinsically. She is pinned to the “quick blue” of the sky — the imprecise location of that which the apple (her original object of desire) had imitated. The heavenly or at least otherworldly implications and their implicit spatial hierarchy shouldn’t be lost on us.
Whether Crane would have intended this as critique of suffrage or of moral knowledge, we can derive a reading that treats it as a critique not of female subject in relation to suffrage or moral knowledge but of the enfranchisement of the person as such. After all, in the Genesis account, while woman was the first to taste the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (The tale of suffrage in the US is a bit more fraught and complex, to say nothing of the presence of extra-textual evidence.)
Crane appears to foresee what Foucault would later diagnose as the problem intrinsic to the political-juridical concept of sovereignty, which consists in the fact that the concept of sovereignty entails sovereignty over others, vis-a-vis the crown and its subjects. As such, just as republican democracy’s egalitarian impulse gradually turns each person into their very own monarch, the whole society becomes more and more like the Cyclopes (“round-eyes”) of Homer’s Odyssey. Here we see what Madison identifies as the problem of faction exacerbated by the individualized intersectionality de Tocqueville would identify.
With democratic participation being the minimal expression of sovereignty within the US body politic, each member of the voting populace comes to dream themselves as identical with the “We the People” enshrined in our political gospels. As such, each seeks to impose their will on the others — and resents all who deign to do the same.
Unlike woman expelled from the garden in the narrative of Genesis by a patriarchal heavenly authority, Crane depicts a person absorbed, ensnared and deluded by the American electoral tree (or the narrow view of morality to which they’ve pledged allegiance) such that their entire psychology is confined to that very system and what lies beneath it.
In addition to being a beautiful depiction of a garden scene Crane issues not an argument against voting or political parties, but rather an insightful critique that one ought not make too much of such conventions.vFor what are the costs of a pretension to either moral knowledge or of full enfranchisement?
The mention of memory, fear and hope in the penultimate line recalls Virgil’s commentary on the inscription above the gates of hell. One reading of these closing lines would have these psychological factors are withheld from her insofar as she perceives herself to be the tree.
This issue of shadow — produced by the presence of objects that block the light — comes back around in the closing line as one of two principle objects of the woman’s fears, hopes and memories. The second, of course, is the grass — that which lies beneath the tree and beneath her feet, a field on which both the tree, its fruit and the woman cast their shadows.
In the Genesis narrative, the ground is also where the tempting serpent — who never seems to have uttered a lie — is exiled to crawl. The shadows or the darkness may be that which people fear, but it is the mimic of the light source that does them in.
Composed and published some 10 years before the photographs of lynchings that would inspire Abel Meeropol to compose the poem that would become immortalized in Billie Holliday voice as “Strange Fruit.” But reading the two in as an unintended diptych produces a bracing effect that highlights the legacy and responsibilities inherited by those who have the right to vote. It also forces one to interrogate their own claims to moral knowledge and to ask where justice resides in such images.
Certainly, the vote and the moral knowledge on which the conscience is grounded are intimately linked, and desire plays a crucial role as a necessary catalyst. The question that Crane seems to leave open is whether the apotheosis of that desire for either — not mere attainment but even exercise — suffices.
Moreover, enfranchised citizens in the US lack a democratic role in the one plays where moral knowledge is most critical: judicial review. Thus, a perennial problem of even this republican democracy is that one majority’s moral knowledge remains a transgression on the account of another minority’s. And, even absent an emergent sovereign like Hobbes’ Leviathan, the body politic ultimately does act as one entity. Thus, all are complicit in the American tree.
All of this analysis, surely, would read very differently when predicated instead on George Bataille’s nonpolitical concept of sovereignty as an expenditure beyond utility. In this conception, durability seeks immateriality as its ideal. Similarly, Baitaille’s concept of the tragedy of the sacred traces the contours of precisely such a scene as Crane sketches here. I’ll leave you to listen to the recent episode of Acid Horizon focused on Bataille and consider the implications for Crane’s poem.
News & Notes
Spoonie Press publishes a weekly magazine and biannual journal focused work by and for disabled, chronically ill and neurodivergent individuals. This project is eminently interesting for its scope as well as the attention it brings to marginalized communities whose concerns and perspectives are often excluded from public discourse. If you happen to identify with their constituency, I heartily encourage submitting; I will be.
Danne Jobin has a great fledgling Youtube channel called Poetology that regularly features reviews of particularly progressive poetry (and fiction and art) books and journals, as well as tips on creativity, collage, writing and submission. I highly recommend reading, viewing and subscribing.
Have you listened to Dan Nielsen’s Five Minutes podcast? You should. He’s a talented and consummate polymath maker of poetry, fiction, music, standup comedy and visual art and music who’s been in the small-press game for a while. The first season recently concluded, so go through his backlog of digestible episodes and enjoy before he (hopefully) springs another season on us. After you listen, slide into his DMs and have a chat.
Seeking Submissions
As interesting as these public domain poems are, I’d like to give some attention to contemporary writing as well. Send me a poem of yours and let me know what you’ve thought about the review so far at paper.knives.poetry@gmail.com. Maybe I’ll interpret your poem and publish it here.
Photo by Nathan Hulsey on Unsplash