SOURCE: "Three Critics on One Poem: Hart Crane's 'Voyages III'," in Essays in Criticism, Vol. XLVI, No. 1, 1996, pp. 16-27.

In the following commentary, which was written in 1948 but not published until 1996, Empson, Heringman, and Unterecker analyze the "consanguinity" of the narrator's lover and the sea in Hart Crane's poem "Voyages III."

Infinite consanguinity it bears—
 This tendered theme of you that light
 Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
 Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
 While ribboned water lanes I wind
 Are laved and scattered with no stroke
 Wide from your side, whereto this hour
 The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.

And so, admitted through black swollen gates
 That must arrest all distance otherwise,—
 Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
 Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
 Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
 Your body rocking!
 and where death, if shed,
 Presumes no carnage, but this...