A man feared that he might find an assassin;
  Another that he might find a victim.
  One was more wise than the other.

Today’s poem, it would seem, scarce deserves the name - it lacks most of those qualities that one associates with the explicitly poetic. And yet, it is one of my favourite verses from The Black Riders - in its beautifully self-contained ambiguity it seems to embody McLeish’s injunction that “a poem should not mean, but be”.

Links

For a more general discussion of Crane’s poetry, including a biography, see
poem #196

McLeish’s poem, Ars Poetica, can be found at poem #188

And the complete text of The Black Riders (which you are strongly urged to read, in that this poem deserves to be read in its larger context) is available at the Poets’ Corner,
http://geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/crane02.html.

— Martin