by Frederico Reiser

Created on: December 17, 2009   Last Updated: December 18, 2009

When I first had contact with Stephen Crane's poetry, I must admit that I was surprised by it. I have never seen in my life a small poem bearing such a potent meaning. That poem was “Fast rode the knight”. I totally related to it, because, at first glance, I thought it was about neglecting the things we love, but after a year of literature classes, my (favorite) teacher made me take another look at the poem and I think that maybe my sense of perception became more tuned or trained. I don't know exactly, but I could realize that it was about the consequences of our actions. This breakthrough made me even more fond of Crane's poetry, because I became interested to know the true reason of each of his works. In the quest for more of his poetry, I stumbled on some wonderful pieces that, like the poem mentioned above, connected with me. These poems, generally small, caught my attention because most of them were focusing in one theme; atheism.

Some people might think that Crane was just a young man angry at the church. I admit that I thought that too, but when I read about his early life, that he was son of a minister who preached at an Episcopal Church and that his mother was daughter of a clergyman, I began to realize that there was even more feeling behind his poetry that I imagined. I wondered how could a boy spend most part of his childhood amidst a religious family and later write poems against church. What event made him grow so severe against it? That question might never be answered, but maybe we can understand this great man a little more by analyzing “Two or three angels” a bit.

The poem opens with the image of two, or maybe three, angels coming down to earth. When arriving, they come across a weird event. They observe a “fat” church with “little black streams of people” entering it. Crane uses the words “fat” and “little” to magnify the immensity of the church toward the faithful crowd, leaving us with the contrasting picture of an enormous building and small gathering of people. The author uses this same technique in “Fast rode the knight”, when he puts the bloody horse near the waving flag of victory in order to create a bigger impact on the reader.

At the end of “Two or three angels”, the heavenly beings look amazed at the scene. They don't see the reason why so many people are entering the church. Crane leave us wondering why people go to the church to pray to an omnipresent God.

Learn more about this author, Frederico Reiser.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.