Although a verse from this poem forms the epigraph to only A Streetcar Named Desire, its elegiac tone and pervasive themes underscore both Williams’ play and Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
Instead of inspiring him to come to God, the bell tower “dispatches” him to wander from “pit to crucifix” exploring the “broken world” trying to “trace the visionary company of love,” sensing it for “an instant in the wind” but ultimately unable to find it.
The narrator seems unsure whether it his words, his crystal Word, his poetry, that could help him attain love or “she/ Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power.” Still, something, at least for the moment, helps him to build a tower, “not stone,” but a tower of “pebbles” that “lifts love in its shower.”
This fragile love is what most rings true in the poem, for love always seems tenuous, fleeting, threatening to destroy us, to leave us, or, perhaps worst of all, to silently erode to “habit.”
(Webster, Loren, 2003, Crane’s ‘The Broken Tower’, from In a Dark Time … The Eye Begins to See, http://www.lorenwebster.net/In_a_Dark_Time/2003/08/20/cranes-the-broken-tower/)
Excerpt from The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald
On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Here also is the sense of broken dreams, the “incoherent failure” of a house and of a dream Gatsby had, which is now smeared with “an obscene word”, much like the brutal Stanley erases the last of Blanche’s dreams and sanity with an obscene action.
There is a sense of a greater vanishing of beauty too, in “mostly closed” and “hardly any lights”; all pervasive is the sense of loss and regret. Yet like with Blanche, Mary and the male Tyrones there is also a sense of “a transitory enchanted moment” that cannot last, except in this extract from Fitzgerald’s novel that magical moment is applied to America itself.
And Gatsby’s motive for his great attempt at finding “wonder” again, reflected so strongly in Blanche and Mary, is love. The idealized love of youth which will not accept that kind of love is dead. Gatsby, we are told, “believed in the green light” of promise and was broken by his failure to attain it.
This failure is because we are “borne back ceaselessly into the past”, which haunts us and we ultimately cannot escape. Thus this extract too exposes the wonder and tragedy of idealism, the fragility of our hopes and dreams and love.
Setting
Some main props, motifs and stylistic features
Themes
- impact of sensitivity on lives of the protagonists
- futility of understanding oneself when it does not seem to empower us enough
- impact of social class and social setting
- fatalistic outlook on life as both plays are studies of the past determining the future and how this seems inescapable
- sense of existence as essentially tragic
- idealism versus harsh reality
- the tragic effects of denial and evasion
- the inability to escape the horrors of life without paying a terrible price, for example Blanche’s compulsive lying and Mary’s addiction to Morphine prove self-destructive
- the heartbreaking tenderness, fragility and cruelty of love
- damage caused by money and materialism on humanity and ideals
- impact of status and the need for good reputation
- sense of homelessness of the two lead females, Mary and Blanche
- the plays contrast a crumbling South and the ideals it stood for, with its grand columned mansions and aristocratic pretentions, and new rich in the North failing to escape the impact of their impoverished ‘Irish bog’ ancestry; both represent American failures to escape the past on a cultural level
- contrast the aspirations represented by the Tyrones and DuBois against the New Americans, represented by Stanley, who are materialistic, uneducated and ultimately prove callous
- stage as metaphor for the American Dream, for example the reason people emigrated to America was to escape their pasts, and they dreamed of better and brighter futures – ‘America: Land of Opportunity’. However, the plays explore the disillusionment and insecurity which comes when our hopes and dreams are lost because of our inability to escape the past
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.
