“in the bitterness / i would have stayed up with you all night / had i known how to save a life”

For Poetry Monday, a more famous desert poem also from Crane’s first collection:

“In the desert,” Stephen Crane

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”


Crane was a little too early to be a Modernist (as a prose writer, he was part of the pre-modern Realist and Naturalist movements, not that I can tell the difference between those), but he was a strong proximate influence on especially the Imagists.

---L.

Subject quote from How to Save a Life, The Fray.