Van+Winkle

=Powhatan's Daughter=

> Van Winkle
Lewis quotes (p. 293) a September 1927 letter of Crane's to Otto Kahn in which Crane says that over the course of this poem, the poet (Lewis assumes there a single figure of "the poet") walks to the subway:

"'The walk to the subway . . . arouses reminiscences of childhood, also the "childhood" of the continental conquest, viz., the conquistadores, Priscilla [Alden, subject of an 1858 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called "[|The Courtship of Miles Standish]"], Capt. John Smith, etc.'"

(numbers refer to lines of the poem)


 * title**: In [|Washington Irving]'s story "[|Rip Van Winkle]," Rip Van Winkle sleeps for twenty years, sleeping through the American Revolution and waking up to find his wife dead and his friends gone.

1: **macadam** : a type of roadway pavement, named after British engineer John L. McAdam (yes, Merriam-Webster spells his name as "Mc" rather than "Mac," even though the surface is spelled the other way), d. 1836. Stress is on the second syllable.

1: **tunny** : a tuna.

2: **Far Rockaway to Golden Gate** : Far Rockaway is a village on Long Island. The Golden Gate Bridge is in San Francisco. The two locations are at opposite ends of the nation, and so a sort of "bridging" is implicit.

3: **hurdy-gurdy** : a musical instrument. Usually a stringed instrument (like a violin) bowed by a hand-crank, with frettable strings alongside drone strings. But here refers to a barrel organ, the "grind-organ" of line 18 (Randel).

13: **Sleepy Hollow** : a reference to Washington Irving's other very famous story, "[|The Legend of Sleepy Hollow]" (in which Van Winkle does not actually appear). Both stories were published in //The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon// (1820).

18: **grind-organ** : A type of barrel organ. A barrel organ is a small organ played by cranking a barrel which has pins on it. The barrel functions like a player-piano roll, automatically playing pre-"recorded" music. The classic barrel organ died out in the 19th century, but a smaller version, worn over the shoulder on a strap, and a version on wheels survived into the 20th century. The version on wheels was usually called a street organ or a hand organ, and was played by an itinerant "organ grinder," which is the source of Crane's term (Randel).

Like the player piano in "Cutty Sark," the "grind-organ" is automatic, a forerunner of the jukebox (for you kids, a "jukebox" was a forerunner of the iPod). It is a piece of technology that makes music, more evidence that technology need not be anti-human or emotionless.

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