'Thus Massive Was the Vessel, Built in Vain'

Gee-whiz technology soon grows obsolete and quaint. On this date in 1934, the USS Macon, a U.S. Navy airship – blimp, dirigible, Zeppelin – successfully tracked the heavy cruiser USS Houston as it carried President Franklin Roosevelt on a secret voyage from Annapolis, Md., to Portland, Ore., by way of Hawaii. The Macon, designed as a scout aircraft, carried five biplanes, one of which delivered mail and newspapers to the president. Seven months later, the Macon encountered a storm off Big Sur and crashed. Two men died, sixty-four were rescued. In response, Yvor Winters wrote “An Elegy” -- “For the U.S.N. Dirigible, Macon.” Here are two of the poem’s seven stanzas: 

“Who will believe this thing in time to come?

I was a witness. I beheld the age

That seized upon a planet’s heritage

Of steel and oil, the mind’s viaticum:

 

“Crowded the world with strong ingenious things,

Used the provision it could not replace,

To leave but Cretan myths, a sandy trace

Through the last stone age, for the pastoral kings.”

 

Without preaching, Winters suggests the airship was an act of hubris, what we might think of as a squandering of natural resources, “a planet’s heritage / Of steel and oil.” What a concept: Yvor Winters, environmentalist.

 

A year earlier, on April 4. 1933, the Macon’s sister airship, the USS Akron, crashed  off the coast of New Jersey. Seventy-three of its seventy-six crewmen were killed. Winters’ wife, Janet Lewis, also wrote a poem, “The Hangar at Sunnyvale: 1937,” about airships and their risks:

 

“Level the marshes, far and low the hills.

The useless structure, firm on the ample sills,

Rises incredible to state again:

Thus massive was the vessel, built in vain. “

 

I foresee a doctoral thesis: “Airships and the Stanford School.” Winters’ former student, Turner Cassity, revived the theme. The entire July 1970 issue of Poetry was devoted to “The Airship Boys in Africa,” a narrative poem in twelve sections about a 1917 German airship expedition to South West Africa. Included in his first collection, Watchboy, What of the Night? (1966), is Cassity’s “The Afterlives of Count Zeppelin,” which begins:

 

“Inflated, yet elliptical, of epic size,

What great Teutonic riddle hangs there in the skies?”