"Stark Major" studies the consequences of a cultivated irresponsibility toward the past. The poet dissociates himself from his former role as lover; it is the death of that role, then, that is referred to in the first line. From that point on, the experience which had been a coherent single reality breaks apart. Interestingly, it is the light of day which begins this process. [...]. He looks at the world with "broken eyes," because his life has lost its redeeming illusion of coherence and objectivity. [His lover's]
has not; therefore, her memory is greater. It still holds her pains and joys together in a single fiction. The poem is composed in "stark major" (major keys are affectively "bright," minor ones "dark") to express the violent effect of clarity upon experience.{ Robert Combs, Vision of the Voyage: Hart Crane and the Psychology of Romanticism.
Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1978, 51-52. }