The Poetry of Melville by Herman Melville
"The Poetry of Melville" refers to the body of work created by American author Herman Melville, who is predominantly recognized for his prose fiction, particularly novels like "Moby-Dick." While his poetry has often been overlooked, recent scholarship has revived interest in his verse, which reflects his complex views on themes like war, faith, and the human experience. Much of Melville's poetry was published during his lifetime, although it initially garnered little attention, partly due to limited print runs and the late release of some works. Notable collections include "Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War," which poetically addresses the American Civil War, and "Clarel," a lengthy exploration of spiritual doubt set in the Holy Land. His later works, such as "John Marr and Other Sailors," show a nostalgic longing for his youth and maritime experiences. Melville's poetry is characterized by its challenging style and symbolic depth, often provoking readers to ponder philosophical questions about existence and morality. Overall, while often overshadowed by his prose, Melville's poetry offers a significant glimpse into his multifaceted literary contributions.
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The Poetry of Melville by Herman Melville
First published:Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, 1866; Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, 1876; John Marr and Other Sailors, 1888; Timoleon, 1891
Critical Evaluation:
Though a few of Herman Melville’s short poems have been reprinted in anthologies of American literature, he is known almost exclusively for his prose fiction. The Melville biographers and critics who mention the poetry usually pass quickly over it, often giving the impression that it may interest some curious readers but that it has no great importance as compared with his novels and stories. In recent years, however, considerable interest has been shown in Melville as a poet.
Most of Melville’s poetry was published during his lifetime, but it drew little attention, partly because the last two volumes were published in editions of only twenty-five copies each. A number of previously unpublished poems did not appear until 1924 in the final volume of the Standard Edition of Melville’s works. A critical edition of the poems (not including the lengthy CLAREL, which occupies two volumes in the Standard Edition) was published in 1947 with explanatory notes and textual notes by Howard P. Vincent. A similar edition of CLAREL, with a critical analytical introduction by Walter E. Bezanson, came out in 1961. Nearly a century after its original publication, Melville’s BATTLE-PIECES AND ASPECTS OF THE WAR was re-issued in 1963 as THE BATTLE-PIECES OF HERMAN MELVILLE in a handsomely printed and profusely illustrated edition with an introduction and extensive notes by Hennig Cohen. The following year Mr. Cohen brought out a volume of SELECTED POEMS OF HERMAN MELVILLE, which contains, in addition to many of the poems in Vincent’s edition, several passages from CLAREL and over eighty pages of comment by the editor on individual poems. Cohen quotes many of Melville’s notes to the poems and frequently draws attention to the relationship between certain poems and Melville’s various works of fiction.
Melville’s first published volume of verse did not appear until 1866, and most of his extant verse was written in the last thirty-five years of his life. But his symbolic novel MARDI, published in 1849, contains some romantic effusions by the poet Yoomy and several other brief poems. In 1860, when Melville sailed for San Francisco on his brother’s ship, he left with his wife a manuscript volume of poems for which she was to find a publisher if possible. No publisher was found, but many of the poems in TIMOLEON, which came out in the year of Melville’s death, may be among those in the earlier unpublished book.
A number of critics and biographers have called attention to the difficulties which face the beginning reader of Melville’s verse. Newton Arvin has observed that Melville the poet seems to be a prose writer working with verse. Robert Penn Warren has found the seemingly inept distortions and wrenchings in many lines to represent a possible attempt to develop a style fitted to a man of Melville’s masculine temperament. Laurence Barrett sees the violences and wrenchings as often effective, especially upon rereading, and as conscious technical devices being used sometimes awkwardly but occasionally with marked success.
Melville explains in a prefatory note to BATTLE-PIECES AND ASPECTS OF THE WAR that most of the poems in the volume were the result of an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond in 1865. The arrangement is generally chronological but not strictly so. The first poem, “The Portent,” concerns the hanging of John Brown on December 2, 1859, and most of the poems at the end of the volume relate to events of 1864 and 1865, though several return to earlier years of the war. Among the best poems are “The Portent,” “The Conflict of Convictions,” “The March into Virginia,” “The Temeraire,” “Malvern Hill,” and “The Martyr.”
In “The Portent” the body of John Brown hangs swaying from the scaffold beam, throwing a symbolic shadow on the green of the Shenandoah Valley which will be stained later with so much red. As the hangman’s cap covers Brown’s face, so the future is veiled, but the streaming beard of “Weird John Brown” ominously forecasts the “meteor of the war.”
“The Conflict of Convictions,” with its obvious allusions to the war in Heaven in PARADISE LOST, shows an indifferent God who will not stop men when they make their choices: “The People spread like a weedy grass, / The thing they will they bring to pass.” The boyish soldiers in “The March into Virginia” proceed into the “leafy neighborhood” near Manassas with the lightsome joyousness of picnickers. But, says Melville, some in the next three days will “Perish, enlightened by the volied glare,” and others will survive to endure the shame of a second defeat in the same area a few weeks later. In “The Temeraire” an old Englishman fondly and sadly recalls the passing away forever of the glorious oldtime sea battles of the great wooden sailing ships, while he muses on the fight between the small and unromantic ironclads MONITOR and MERRIMAC.
“Shiloh” is a brief and beautiful requiem for the soldiers who fell there and who lie now “While over them the swallows skim, / And all is hushed at Shiloh.” As the swallows in this poem symbolize the indifference of nature to man’s bloody conflicts, so do the elms in “Malvern Hill”:
We elms of Malvern Hill
“The Martyr” portrays poetically the grief over the land on the day of Lincoln’s death, but in its refrain it anticipates the spirit of vengefulness which the murder incited: “Beware the People weeping/When they bare the iron hand.”
CLAREL: A POEM AND PILGRIMAGE IN THE HOLY LAND, Melville’s second book of poetry, is a single poem of twenty thousand lines inspired by a journey to Palestine in 1857 and by Melville’s speculations on theology, philosophy, science, belief, doubt, and the nature of the human soul. Newton Arvin has called it a novel of ideas in verse, which suggests the slight significance of its story line as compared with the space devoted to the opposed views of the numerous pilgrims who appear, disappear, and reappear in the 150 cantos. The basic story concerns young Clarel, a spiritually troubled American divinity student who seeks a resolution of his inner conflict between faith and doubt through a journey to the Holy Land. He falls in love with Ruth, whose American-Jewish father is murdered. While she is in mourning for her father, Clarel joins a group of pilgrims on a journey to various parts of Palestine. On his return he learns that Ruth has died of grief, and after he had watched the burial of Ruth and her mother he is left at the end of the poem still pondering the ways of God and the fate of man.
Among the pilgrims with whom Clarel is briefly associated are Celio, a handsome but hunchbacked Catholic, embittered and doubting; Rolfe, a former sailor who somewhat resembles Melville himself in his experiences and his appearance; Vine, an American whose creative ability and moral and aesthetic views suggest that Melville modeled him after his one-time friend Hawthorne; Derwent, an Anglican clergyman with pleasing manners but a superficial mind; Mortmain, a disillusioned idealist; and Ungar, an ex-Confederate officer who, while critical of man and his society and institutions, believes in man’s need of a religious faith to sustain him in a confused and confusing world.
CLAREL is difficult to read not merely because of its great length but because, as Willard Thorp has said, it has all the faults of a “private” poem and thus one should come to it only after having learned much about Melville’s moods and speculative questings. Though the poem itself leaves Clarel still searching for the sustaining faith he has not found, Melville, in the brief “Epilogue,” directly addresses Clarel (and any doubting reader as well, one may assume), urging him to keep his heart to the end when “Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea, / And prove that death but routs life into victory.”
In JOHN MARR AND OTHER SAILORS, Melville, now nearing seventy, turned back nostalgically to his years as a sailor. The title poem may perhaps reflect a feeling the poet himself had often had, of being separated forever, through time and distance, from the companions of his youth. John Marr, living on a Middle-western prairie after having lost his wife and child, longs to hear from those he once knew, and he asks wistfully, “Why, lads, so silent here to me, / Your watchmate of times long ago?” Other poems with this mood of reminiscence are “Tom Deadlight,” spoken by an old and dying petty officer, and “Jack Roy,” which celebrates again the manly, ebullient character of Jack Chase, who was a character in WHITE-JACKET and the sailor to whom Melville dedicated BILLY BUDD. Though “Billy in the Darbies” did not appear in the JOHN MARR volume but was appended at the end of BILLY BUDD, it may be grouped with the sailor poems and it is one of the best of them. In form it is a ballad represented as having been composed by one of Billy’s shipmates in memory of the beloved sailor after his hanging for the accidental killing of a ship’s officer.
Two very different poems from the JOHN MARR volume are “The Maldive Shark” and “The Enviable Isles.” The first conveys poetically the theme that Melville had treated so often in his fiction: the mystery of evil in the world. The shark is pictured as too stupid to find its own food unless guided by the “sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,” who are the “Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull, / Pale revener of horrible meat.” The reader is left to wonder, as did Melville, where lies evil? With the shark? with the pilot-fish? Or with the Creator who made them both and all else in creation? Or is the shark’s voraciousness simply man’s interpretation of evil, but really no evil at all, only a survival of the fittest, the dull-witted shark and his helpful little pilot-fish?
“The Enviable Isles” pictures a green, sleepy land of swaying palms in the uplands and sweet fern and moss in the glades where “myriads lie Dimpling in dream—unconscious mere, While billows endless round the beaches die.” As Cohen notes, the final word of the poem suggests, as do several other words, that these are the Isles of the Dead whose sleep is endless after the storms of life.
Of the poems in TIMOLEON, Melville’s last published volume, many are travel poems related to the poet’s trip to Europe and the Middle East in 1856-1857. In the title poem, based on the life of a Corinthian statesman and general, Cohen sees hidden autobiographical relationships. The second poem in the volume, “After the Pleasure Party,” has attracted considerable comment and disagreement as to its meaning and even its form. Vincent calls it a dramatic monologue and takes issue with Lewis Mumford for having assigned the monologue to a man, Melville himself. Cohen resolves some of the ambiguity of the complex poem by assigning different parts to two speakers: a woman who is troubled over the discovery of her own strong sexuality; and the poet himself, who warns her of the power of Amor, god of love, and in the closing lines warns also “virgins everywhere, / O pray! Example take too, and have care.”
The short poem “Monody” has a special appeal because of its commemoration of the brief friendship of Melville and Hawthorne, the lengthy later separation calling forth after Hawthorne’s death the anguished cry in the poem, “Ease me, a little ease, my song,” The closing lines, “Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine / That hid the shyest grape,” are a reminder also of the Hawthorne-like character Vine in CLAREL.
Among the poems of Melville not printed until 1924 in the Standard Edition are a group collectively entitled WEEDS AND WILDINGS, WITH A ROSE OR TWO which, according to Vincent, were obviously intended for private publication. Though for the most part unremarkable as poetry, they are of interest as reflecting Melville’s happy life at Arrowhead, near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he had lived with his family from 1850 to 1863. A long prefatory introduction also shows his love for his wife Lizzie, who was in temperament quite different from him. One of the most unusual aspects of these poems written late in Melville’s life is that they show a love of rural life and the quiet beauty of a nature very different from the terrifying, destructive natural world of his sea fiction and his sea poetry. Though one poem, “The American Aloe on Exhibition,” appears to refer symbolically to Melville’s disappointment in having lost his audience of earlier years, many of the other poems seem to suggest that in his closing years Melville was not the embittered man he is supposed by some commentators to have been, but rather a husband living a happy old age with his wife of many years.
Bibliography
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Branch, Watson G., ed. Melville: The Critical Heritage. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.
Davey, Michael J., ed. A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” New York: Routledge, 2004.
Dryden, Edgar A. Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Hardwick, Elizabeth. Herman Melville. New York: Viking Press, 2000.
Heflin, Wilson L. Herman Melville’s Whaling Years. Edited by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Thomas Farel Heffernan. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.
Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker, eds. Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” New York: G. K. Hall, 1992.
Johnson, Claudia Durst. Understanding Melville’s Short Fiction: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.
Levine, Robert S., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography—Volume 1, 1819-1851. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography—Volume 2, 1851-1891. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. Melville: A Biography. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1996.