The Contaminated Vision
63
The reptile-intoxicant is now totally out of control as he proposes that he will be
unskeined from his mortal limitations so he can revel in the special power of a
feathered, sky-bound arrow of poetic inspiration. It is a strange mix, a complex
and illogical menagerie of euphoric oddities and incompatible images with no
rational connection; but, rational or not, Crane is concerned with describing the
kind of alcoholic insanity and recessive thinking that is typical among the
chronically addicted, most especially because such a perspective would
necessarily be predicated on disillusionment and failure. Of course, the magic
arrow, such as it is, is doomed to collapse (Leibowitz 211); and the intoxicant’s
serpent skin, like the serpent of Genesis, contains only a facsimile of truth which
is barely heard and which betrays his hope for salvation from his heaven-bound
“arrow.”
The patchwork of fraud is now extended from the leopard, serpent, and
arrow to include a beer-buying urchin and his canister (we are reminded that
such juvenile purchases were commonplace at the time). Crane does not tell us
the boy’s intentions, but apparently his youth and urchin duplicity have
something to do with the loss of innocence, August meadows (referred to in line
23), and the purchase of alcohol. However, as with so many of the chronically
addicted, the drinker’s mental condition is shaky, his attention span short.
Before long, he tires of looking at the child, and the urchin image is displaced by
a horrifying vision of writhing bodies as the poet-writer’s inebrious flight to
creative ecstasy begins its inevitable downward spiral into a series of terrifying
hallucinations. The intoxicant averts his gaze, but as he turns away, the sight of
two black tusks on a nearby hunting trophy confirm his fear and revulsion while
denying any possibility of creative wonderment:
Unwitting the stigmas that each turn repeal;
Between black tusks the roses shine! (27-28)
The poet-intoxicant tries to elude the prospect of imminent destruction by
focusing on the roses between the tusks. Perhaps, in his typically potulent
fascination with self-transposition and self-denial, they might summon enough
power to provide an escape from the narrow confines of mortality and the lost
prospect of renewed inspiration. Perhaps then he might still be able to discover
some kind of liquor embellished euphoria and fling his arrow of creative
fantasies to a bibulous heaven of immortality (Lewis 198). However, there is no
material evidence that our intoxicant is capable of generating anything hawk
like, rosy, or profound; and, while he hopes to transcend his earthly self on a
heaven-bound “arrow” of productivity, the image suggests no divine union with
a higher truth, much as he would hope otherwise.
It is becoming clear that wine is not the father of insight. Nor can the
menagerie assure any kind of metamorphosis into some kind of hallucinatory
genius (Hazo 45). In truth, the intoxicant’s wine “talons” clutch at him with all
kinds of romantic nonsense about the breadth of his addictive genius; and, even
though he grandly claims the exaltation of his creative powers, his unadulterated