Line 26: “Borders of three states”- “the narrator looks out over the three American states (New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut) visible from the top of the derelict Mizzentop Hotel; but these three states also come to connote the three dimensional material world which the poet aspires to see beyond” (Giles 21).
Courtesy of dons notes
Line 30: “Czars of Golf”- this is a reference to someone who had great power and authority, good at golfing, and changing rules. “These persons-‘the Czars of Golf,” Crane calls them in a phrase which “anticipates F.D. Roosevelt’s ‘economic royalists’-are fatally bereft of the visionary capacity, which perceives the life span of divinity in the round of the season” ( Lewis 348).
Line 33: “Promised Land”- according to critics, Crane is referring to how Quaker Hill the “natural” landscape has been refracted through a capitalist perspective. Indeed, “now the promises now are only real estate values” (Giles 38).
Line 36: “Bubbles in time to Hollywood’s new love-nest pageant”- is the shadow of Hollywood icon. “The Promised Land is now promising only to real estate agents and bootleggers; and the community of love has degenerated into ‘Hollywood’s new love-nest pageant'” (Lewis 351).
Line 37: “Old meeting House (Now the New Avalon Hotel)”- this was to attract the touring. “The ironies of juxtaposing the ‘Promise Land’ of the ‘Old Meeting House’ with that of the bootlegger and the New Avalon Hotel are chiefly the ironies of seeing values under the aspects of time and change ” (Combs 159).
Old Meeting House in Pawling
Courtesy of Key Posters
Line 43: “Powitzky”- “She was Crane’s neighbor, in Patterson NY” (Berthoff 106).
Line 44: “Adam’s auction”- “In here the auction in the material world mirrors the primal event, the fall of man so that pun becomes synecdoche of all human history” (Giles 16).
Line 48: “Where are my kinsmen and the patriarch race?”- Here Crane is referring to particularly in the society value that “patriarch role” (father have no role anymore), “because Crane’s father was not around him, to depend on him and have his father support (birthright). The Quaker doctrine of brotherly love provides the occasion for meditating questions about the amount of trust one can really place in humankind. ‘His patriarch race,’ are not to be found, at any rate, on Quaker Hill, which is now simply the sense of fat complacency. To assert his potential for love-of man, love of reality-the poet must again come down to the lowliest aspects of life” (Lewis 349).
Courtsey of NYPL.