SOURCE: Stappenbeck, Herb. “Crane's ‘The Open Boat’.” The Explicator 34, no. 1 (February 1976): 41.

In the following essay, Stappenbeck explores the link between “The Open Boat” and Caroline Norton's poem “Bingen on the Rhine.”

Stephen Crane's “The Open Boat” has been the subject of numerous commentaries, many of which agree that the central theme concerns man's relation to nature and his relation to his fellow man. Some of these readers have seen as a major link between these two relationships Caroline E. S. Norton's “Bingen on the Rhine,” a poem that the correspondent had memorized as a child and that “mysteriously entered [his] head” immediately after his recognition of “the pathos of his situation” (The Works of Stephen Crane, ed. Fredson Bowers, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970, V, 85). Only Marston LaFrance in A Reading of Stephen Crane (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), however, has pointed out that “the correspondent identifies himself with … the...