C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/1907904/WORKINGFOLDER/STNS/9780521888448C04.3D 65 [65–80] 15.7.2010 7:22AM 4 TIM DEAN The erotics of transgression O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog, Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached By time and the elements; but there is a line You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast. The bottom of the sea is cruel. A vivid warning about transgression, these lines by the modern American poet Hart Crane conclude the initial poem of ‘Voyages’, a lyric sequence inspired by his maritime lover Emil Opffer. 1 The penalty for crossing the line here is death, figured as an ineluctable embrace by the sea, whose ‘caresses’ represent a fatal union. Yet the poem does exactly what it warns against, with its strongly enjambed syntax luring readers across the line before we’re aware of the transgression (‘but there is a line / You must not cross’). As the heavy caesurae of the stanza’s opening lines give way to the enjambment of those that follow, so the innocent, earth-bound identities are overtaken by the dark dissolution of the sea. The boundary that is crossed not only separates one line of poetry from another but also divides shore from sea, innocence from experience, childhood from adulthood and this world from the next. The ‘line / You must not cross’ thus suggests an ontological limit as well as a formal division. Since the speaker cautions the ‘brilliant kids’ not to transgress a boundary that the adult reader seems always already to have crossed, we may infer that the fraught line has something to do with sexuality (the imagery of fondling, frisking and caressing, in conjunction with the ‘Spry cordage of your bodies’, supports this inference). It is striking that, despite the poem’s erotic overtones, neither the children nor the sea are gendered. In subsequent poems of the ‘Voyages’ sequence and elsewhere, Crane figures the sea as archaically fem- inine; here it is as if we confront a scene prior to sexual difference. Not only that: by making erotic excess –‘Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast’– appear indistinguishable from death, the poem evokes a long tradition of imagining sex as potentially fatal. From sexually undifferentiated innocence to deadly excess, the line that demarcates transgression bears an unmistak- ably erotic charge. 65