A Man Said to the Universe

“I saw a man pursuing the horizon” by Stephen Crane (1895)

“I saw a man pursuing the horizon” is a poem from Crane’s first collection, The Black Riders and Other Lines. The poem has the same setup as “A man said to the universe” since both works center on a dialogue. In “I saw a man pursuing the horizon,” the dialogue is between a man and the speaker; the interaction comes after an image of a man speeding around the horizon. Each poem antagonizes the man. The universe counters the man in “A man said to the universe”; the speaker opposes the man in “I saw a man pursuing the horizon.” This poem, too, features a bleak tone and an unfavorable perspective of humankind. Both texts feature overly proud and confident men. They boast of their existence and think they can conquer or consume all that the world—“the horizon”—has to offer. “I saw a man pursuing the horizon” gives the man a chance to reply. It also gave critics of Crane’s singular poetry a chance to mock him. In 1895, The Buffalo Press published a parody of this poem, which Paul Auster includes in Burning Boy (276):

I saw a meter measuring gas.

On and on it ran.

I was disturbed at this,

Because no gas was being used.

“It is futile,” I said,

“You can’t register”—

“You lie!” it cried.

I did.

It ran on.

"Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind" by Stephen Crane (1899)

This poem supplied the title for Crane’s second poetry collection since it features the repetition “[w]ar is kind.” As with “A man said to the universe,” "Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind" features a gloomy worldview. The poem uses irony since war is nor kind: It ia brutal and deadly. Like the universe, war does not care about the lives of men and has no problem creating a “field where a thousand corpses lie” (Line 11). However, this poem does not feature dialogue and might look and read more like a normative poem, with its multiple stanzas and repetition. More so, the presence of the mother takes away from the harsh tone and theme and brings some feeling into the poem as her son has died in a war, and now her “heart hung humble as a button.”

“This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams (1934)

Like “A man said to the universe,” “This Is Just to Say” features a dialogue. Here, the dialogue is not between a man and the universe but between two people. Someone has eaten someone else’s plums for breakfast, and that person is telling them what they have done and apologizing. The tone is not harsh and severe but lighthearted and playful. Unlike the universe, the speaker cares about the person, so they ask the person whose plums they ate, “Forgive me.” Although, the speaker might have something in common with the exclamatory man. The man in Crane’s poem is excited to exist, and the speaker in Williams’s poem is thrilled by the plums, which are “so sweet/ and so cold.” Maybe if both showed some more meekness, neither of their dialogues would be necessary.