From his youthful surge of the early 1920s, Crane composed "Black Tambourine," an outgrowth of a warehouse job he obtained after a black worker was fired. The twelve-line verse, similar in style and tone to works of the Harlem Renaissance, criticizes society's degradation of blacks and, by extension, of poets. The outcast, who resides in a physical and emotional cellar, sits amid the squalor of gnats and roaches. In the middle stanza, the poet moves back in time to Aesop, the Greek fable writer who earned "mingling incantations" by writing about lowly beasts. With much regret, Crane envisions the wandering tambourine player in "some mid-kingdom," his art "stuck on the wall," and his heart far from the ancient world that echoes in his soul.
Written in 1921, the optimistic "Chaplinesque," composed in five five-line stanzas, reprises the exuberance of comic Charlie Chaplin's film The Kid. Like "Black Tambourine," the poem studies the lowly state of the poet, this time from a "we"-centered point of view. To honor the silent screen's "little tramp," Crane's poetic devices turn young writers into fragile kittens and encode with a pun on his first name a promise that "the heart [lives] on." The poet's intent is obvious in line 7, which seeks rescue "from the fury of the street."
