Define and explain the tone of Hart Crane’s “My Grandmother’s Love Letters."

In "My Grandmother's Love Letters," Hart Crane's tone is
one of uncertainty.

Tone is
not the mood of the poem but the author's
attitude towards his subject:

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...similar to mood, [it] describes the author's
attitude toward his material, the audience, or
both.

In this poem, Crane
speaks of what is seen and what is not. For instance, the stars are not seen but the
memory of them is present. (He "sees" his memory of his grandmother but not
who she is.) Here, the idea of memory is introduced, and there is,
according to the speaker, a great deal of room for memory; it can encompass a something
the size of "loose" and "soft" sheets of rain.

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There are no stars
tonight

But those of
memory.

Yet how much room for memory there
is

In the loose girdle of soft
rain.

The presence of the
rain may help set the mood but, in terms of tone, Crane conveys the importance of what
confronts him (the speaker) and the fragile quality of the letters themselves and the
information they contain--perhaps even unknown knowledge of himself in this information
or his grandmother or of the two of them with each
other.

There
is even room enough

For the letters of my mother’s
mother…

That have been pressed so
long

Into a corner of the
roof

That they are brown and
soft,

And liable to melt as
snow.

He must proceed
carefully. The letters are fragile and, in his uncertainty, might not the information or
what he learns of her also be fragile as well? Could what he learns affect how he sees
himself or how she might see him if she knew him not as a grandson but as a
man?

Steps
must be gentle.

It is all hung by an invisible white
hair.

It trembles as birch limbs webbing the
air.

It is suggested that in
preparing himself to discover an unknown side of a woman who was not yet his grandmother
at the time (nor even yet his mother's mother), but rather "Elizabeth," he suspects that
a stranger will emerge. Is he prepared to know her, assumed to be so different from his
grandmother, a young woman probably not yet
married?

Uncertainty is present by the line that stands
alone—he stops to ask himself questions about what he is able to do: will he be strong
enough to face this challenge? Will he be able to reach far enough into the past to make
the connection between the child he was and the man he
is, and his
grandmother?

And I ask
myself...

However, as the
author speaks of leading his grandmother by the hand and helping her to come to terms
with things she may not understand--of the world--or of him--he
"stumbles," almost a sure sign of uncertainty, and then hears pitying laughter in the
sound of the rain.

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Yet I would lead my grandmother by the
hand

Through much of what she would not
understand;

And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the
roof

With such a sound of gently pitying
laughter.

Does the "pitying"
laughter symbolize his grandmother's laughter, as if knowing what
he is going through—a part of life—of meeting those you love face to face as
people, not as labels (grandmother, friend, boss, etc.)? Or does
this laughter symbolize his uncertainty of understanding her, or
moreover, her understanding him, as an impossible
task?

The questions far outweigh the answers and, even at
the end, we don't know what will happen. This, too, leaves the reader with a sense of
uncertainty, the same emotion the author seems to feel as he
approaches the unknown in that attic corner.