I became a bookseller on the streets in 2014 in NYC in the East Village and I sold Hart Crane’s books before I had ever really read any of them or knew much about him. The one fact that people always liked to tell me consistently during my 8 ½ on the street was that good ‘ole Hart jumped from a boat, on his way back to NYC to take his own life. No letter, no body. A suicide in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, far from the book table in the East Village, but on the land of a place that will forever await his return. Of course, this fact repeated over and over again piqued my curiosity and one of the first poems I read by Crane still remains one of my favorites. It is the unforgettable poem Legend. The second stanza is as follows, ‘I am not ready for repentance; / Nor to match regrets. For the moth / Bends no more than the still / Imploring flame. And tremorous / In the white falling flakes / Kisses are, -- / The only worth all granting.’
I could sit forever on these lines/ in these lines, the brilliance of a Cleveland boy hinting at the desperate yearning for love while being immersed in one's surroundings being able to assert the belief that love is worth fighting for. This is a spiritual poem that would be recited in my head while walking the streets alone of Napoli or Cairo or NYC. To have no regrets, to continue on, to be so bold and courageous and precise in ones declarations. This, to me, is what makes a life worth living and perhaps what makes a life worth taking. Hart Crane 1899-1932.
-Jen Fisher