Lines 39-40: “Let’s have a pencil Jimmy — living now at Floral Park” – Crane’s usage of dialogue here is supposed to mirror fragmented conversation that he either over hears on the subway, or takes part in. But, he does not make the fragments cohesive. Floral Park is a very small town in Nassau, New York, just on the border of the city. It is only one square mile in diameter and is home to a very small population.
Courtesy of NYPL
Line 41: “Flatbush” – A neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Notable because of Crane’s association with Brooklyn and Manhattan and “the bridge” that connected them. In Crane’s time, Flatbush was a very ethnically diverse neighborhood.
Courtesy of NYPL
Courtesy of NYPL
Line 44: “The Culver Line” – A subway line that extends from downtown Brooklyn to Coney Island.
Line 47: “This answer lives like verdigris”- A green/blue deposit that forms on copper. Think of the color that old pennies turn.
Line 51-52: “IS THIS FOURTEENTH?” – The men’s bathroom in the Union Square subway station was notoriously known as a homosexual meet up spot (http://ephemeralnewyork.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/subwaybathroom.jpg).
Line 58: “The phonographs of hades in the brain…” – Hades is considered the underground world of the dead, in Greek mythology.
Line 60: “A burnt match skating in a urinal” – Critics argue that this is a metaphor for a post-orgasmic penis. Others argue that it is part of the repetition, the antithesis of what imaginative qualities The Bridge is supposed to evoke.