"Lachrymae Christi" -Hart Crane

Making a purchase on this poem in any sort of wholesale form was impossible for me, but somehow the potency of the images lingered like a blow to the head. My readings have graduated from an apocalyptic vision of contemporary Cities of the Plain into a rumination on the general project of the Romantic artist—that is, to convert raw emotion and mystical experience into a piece cathartic verse. I’ve only started reading Crane recently, so I’m not qualified to situate this poem within his broader oeuvre. It comes from his first book of poems, White Buildings. The title is rendered in English “Tears of Christ.” Strangely, a wine I recently consumed (twice) bears the same Latinate title. It is a simple, fleshy Italian white from a vineyard located on Mount Vesuvius.


Lachrymae Christi

Whitely, while benzine
Rinsings from the moon
Dissolve all but the windows of the mills
(Inside the sure machinery
Is still
And curdled only where a sill
Sluices its one unyielding smile)

Immaculate venom binds
The fox's teeth, and swart
Thorns freshen on the year's
First blood. From flanks unfended,
Twanged red perfidies of spring
Are trillion on the hill.

And the nights opening
Chant pyramids,--
Anoint with innocence,--recall
To music and retrieve what perjuries
Had galvanized the eyes.

While chime
Beneath and all around
Distilling clemencies,--worms'
Inaudible whistle, tunneling
Not penitence
But song, as these
Perpetual fountains, vines,--

Thy Nazarene and tinder eyes.

Let sphinxes from the ripe
Borage of death have cleared my tongue
Once again; vermin and rod
No longer bind. Some sentient cloud
Of tears flocks through the tendoned loam:
Betrayed stones slowly speak.)

Names peeling from Thine eyes
And their undimming lattices of flame,
Spell out in palm and pain
Compulsion of the year, O Nazarene.

Lean long from sable, slender boughs,
Unstanched and luminous. And as the nights
Strike from Thee perfect spheres,
Lift up in lilac-emerald breath the grail
Of earth again—

Thy face
From charred and riven stakes, O
Dionysus, Thy
Unmangled target smile.


The most difficult stanza, I believe, begins with “Let sphinxes from…” For me, resolving the difficult syntactic and semantic aberrations was akin to tackling a Magic-Eye crossword puzzle—to the point that I was physically turning the book on its side for new “angles.” Reading “let” as an adjective is crucial to the first sentence, which makes it synonymous with “loosed” or “released.” Leaving the “letting” agent deliberately ambiguous insinuates a divine, unearthly power descending to bestow inspiration on the poet. But it’s a damn gruesome portrait of inspiration (I can’t help but think of Isaiah and the burning coal). Compare with Wordsworth’s recollection in tranquility, or Milton’s invocation! The image “Betrayed stones slowly speak” is the lynchpin of this poem’s dramatic force—and its soft redemptive power. But before analyzing it, I want to parse out the narrative development.

The opening landscape sets the reader firmly (this firmness will erode) in the industrial/post-industrial age, with an alliterative serpent (sill / [that] Sluices its one unyielding smile) moving in sibilants through a scene of caustic, stagnant waste. The first sentence finishes, on the other side of the parentheses in the next strophe, in which chemical imagery gives way to a more violent, dynamic, organic destruction. Insidious sibilants give way to a more forceful, but somehow unsatisfying, set of fricatives. The lamb (flanks unfended), of course, is Christ, and the red of his blood contrasts with the “whitely” benzine. This “white” is a symbol of spiritual purity; but it also represents a sterile, cold, chemical blankness, which contrasts with the red passion of a human body. The life force of this blood is such that it “twangs” (literally plucks a string) a trillion perfidies on Golgotha (note the temporal shift)—a song that will continue to reverberate in the next two strophes, and rise to celestial prominence in the closing lines.

“Thy Nazerene and tinder eyes” marks the major turn in the poem. The first half has laid the groundwork for Christ’s fiery death and ultimate resurrection in the form of Dionysus. (Before diving in, I just want to point out, if it’s not already obvious, that I’m treating Christ/Dionysus as a poet-figure, and visa-versa.) The second half images a sort of profane illumination rooted in the surging passion of Dionysus and a purgatorial vision of poetic inspiration.

Let sphinxes from the ripe
Borage of death have cleared my tongue
Once again; vermin and rod
No longer bind. Some sentient cloud
Of tears flocks through the tendoned loam:
Betrayed stones slowly speak.)

The image here is beyond elliptical: sphinxes from the ripe borage of death? I’m not going to attempt a word-by-word reading. I see this as a loosing of the Word from its connection with the physical body of Christ (“The Word was God”)—a splitting of the logos, which grants a vigorous, physical strength to poetic language outside of religious constrictions. The “sentient cloud” (the closest thing to God we have in this poem) descends into the earth, infusing the inert landscape with creative agency: betrayed stones slowly speak. First, note the alliteration and the four consecutive hard stresses. It’s good poetry. The reference here is to the verse from the Gospels, which claims that if no one praises God, the very stones will cry out (Luke 19:40). By dying, Christ has betrayed the faithful (remember the trillion perfidies). But in this very betrayal, a new song is rising from the earth itself—one not bound to traditional notions of spirituality. It’s important that the stones begin murmuring within seconds of Christ’s death, and not three days later by an empty tomb.

Crane denies a traditional resurrection. Instead, he locates the redemptive power of Christ in his very mortality. There is no spiritual rebirth, no heaven, no immortality in Crane’s retelling. This is not a cause for despair; rather, it is an affirmation of the physical world as a site of sacred illumination. Further down, the song of the spheres “[lifts] up in lilac-emerald breath the grail / Of earth again,” once again bringing low the celestial realm. Or is it, perhaps, a raising of the mundane?

The poem concludes with Christ, now Dionysus, smiling—a not so subtle response to the diabolical smile in the first stanza. The poet figure has come out victorious, despite having been crucified (and not yet removed from the cross). How? I read it as a thoroughly Romantic victory affirming Shelley’s quasi-religious belief in the the legislative power of poetry. Victory has come through the killing-off of systematic religion and escapist fables. Stripped bare of tradition, Christ's Promethean death unleashes the Word.