Echoes in Recitative: Hart Crane and Toni Morrison in Dialogue
At first glance, Hart Crane and Toni Morrison seem to share only a birthplace in the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio. But a deeper look reveals something more compelling: the possibility that Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” and Hart Crane’s poem “Recitative” might be “twin shadowed halves”. Both works are concerned with fractured perception, ambiguous identity, and the difficulty of holding memory and time together without distortion. Though there is no direct evidence that Morrison wrote her 1983 story in response to Crane’s poem, the thematic and formal resonances suggest an unspoken influence and dialogue across decades. Crane’s poem, with its surreal mirror imagery and dual consciousness, provides a provocative lens through which to reread Morrison’s experimental story—and perhaps to understand it not just as a narrative about race and memory, but also as a musical meditation on the perpetual instability of knowing.
The titles themselves invite comparison. A “recitative” in music refers to a style of delivery that sits between speaking and singing, often used in opera to advance the plot between arias. It’s an inherently liminal form, straddling expression and action. Morrison’s story—Recitatif, the French variant of the same word—lives in that same transitory space: between childhood and adulthood, between truth and misremembering, between racial categories which are deliberately withheld from the reader. We are never told which of the two main characters, Twyla and Roberta, is Black and which is white. The resulting ambiguity of them being “twin shadowed halves” destabilizes not only our assumptions but the very structure of narrative authority. Morrison removes the racial signifier from the text, creating a kind of narrative silence—one that resonates with Crane’s line: “Reciting pain or glee, how can you bear!”
Crane’s poem opens with the image of Janus, the two-faced Roman god of time, beginnings, and transitions. He implores the reader:
“Regard the capture here, O Janus-faced, / As double as the hands that twist this glass.”
This double-facing view—forward and backward, self and other, memory and forgetting—is a perfect metaphor for Twyla and Roberta’s relationship, and for the reader’s shifting sense of who is who. The “glass” twisted in the poem—mirror, binoculars, or telescope—becomes a metaphorical mirror in Morrison’s story: each character reflects and distorts the other, and their memories of shared childhood events diverge and collide, especially regarding Maggie, the mute kitchen worker. Was she Black or white? Was she pushed or did she fall? Morrison leaves the truth suspended, evoking Crane’s own “fragment smile” and his sense of partial, unreliable vision.
Both works also share an obsession with built structures—bridges, towers, shelters—as metaphors for psychological and social scaffolding. Crane’s vision of the city is vertical and vertiginous:
“Built floor by floor on shafts of steel that grant / The plummet heart, like Absalom, no stream.”
Morrison’s Newburgh is horizontal and unsettled, full of social upheaval, protest lines, ruined buildings, and renovated IBM homes. Like Crane’s speaker, Twyla tries to find coherence in this changing landscape—but each attempt is thwarted by memory, guilt, and unresolved identity. Even childhood shelter, St. Bonny’s, becomes a site of ambiguity and harm. Both texts end not with resolution, but with emotional stammering: Crane’s narrator pleads for “equal pride” in time’s passage; Roberta breaks down in a diner, repeating, “Oh shit, Twyla… What the hell happened to Maggie?”
What binds these works most intimately is not plot or character or form, but the haunting specter of “twin shadowed halves” . Morrison writes her story not as a clean narrative arc but in movements—almost like musical stanzas—marked by time jumps and tonal shifts. The friendship between Twyla and Roberta reappears in different “keys”: nostalgic, bitter, warm, combative, regretful. Each encounter is a recitative, a return to the theme with variation. Likewise, Crane’s poem is a series of split intensities rather than a clear argument. He moves by image and mood, mirroring the jagged edges of thought and memory. He ends with the plea:
“Forgive me for an echo of these things, / And let us walk through time with equal pride.”
An echo: not the original, not the truth—but a haunting return, altered, distorted. It’s the perfect image for Morrison’s Maggie, the story’s silent figure of guilt and projection. Both Crane and Morrison are less interested in empirical truth than in the human need to attempt to reconcile what cannot be reconciled.
So in the end, was Morrison inspired by or did she intend to reply to Crane’s poem? It’s an intriguing question, especially since she seems to write in a similar troubled signature—one that sees time as fractured, identity (especially race) as unstable, and memory as both a bridge and a chasm. Crane offers the first ringing shout. Morrison, decades later, may have replied not just with an echo, but with a harmony, a dissonant counterpoint—which deepens the mystery and demands that we listen and read harder. Crane’s plea to “walk through time with equal pride” is a hope, not a truth. That line—or its twin shadowed half—could’ve easily been spoken by Roberta, in the final scene of Morrison’s story. It recognizes that equality—whether of race, class, memory, or grief—is always an aspiration, never an achieved fact.
Below find a crazy ass experimental poem I wrote with this same subject as a theme, among other things note how the poem is framed by an acrostic running down both the right and left margins—
EVITATICER
(a disk horse)
read her taijitu tattoo as mirror
eye = wavicle
chiaroscuric
incubi
Twin waterfowl yodel Lorain’s art
Apocrypha as opera
Toni hearts the crane echo part
in words alas drown i
forgive as epigraf
(for Chloe & Zadie)
