Clarel by Herman Melville

First published: 1876

Type of poem: Narrative

The Poem

Herman Melville wrote Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land during the twenty years that followed his journey to Europe and the Middle East in 1856-1857. Although he had earlier achieved fame through his novels of adventure, he was weakened physically and mentally, a condition exacerbated by his now unsuccessful efforts to provide for his family through his writing. Melville accepted the trip as a gift from his father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw. Judge Shaw and Melville’s wife, Elizabeth, hoped the extended tour would ease the author’s debilitating depression. The trip, which covered fifteen thousand miles and touched on three continents and nine countries, began with a visit to his old friend Nathaniel Hawthorne in Liverpool. From Liverpool, Melville sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea, visiting Constantinople and the pyramids before coming to port in Jaffa. From Jaffa he traveled inland to Jerusalem. Like many tourists of the time, Melville arranged to make a three-day trip eastward from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, passing through Jericho, down the Jordan River to the Dead Sea, and returning to Jerusalem through the ancient monastery of Mar Saba and the village of Bethlehem. This experience provided the basis for the two-volume narrative poem about the spiritual pilgrimage of a young divinity student named Clarel that Melville published in 1876 with a bequest from his uncle Peter Gansevoort.

Melville struggled through the late 1850’s and early 1860’s. Having abandoned fiction, he tried his hand unsuccessfully at the lecture circuit, wrote poetry about the Civil War that was published as Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), failed in attempts to procure a consulship, and was troubled by bouts of rheumatism and sciatica. Financially drained, he sold his country home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1863. In 1866, he was appointed to a four-dollar-a-day job as a customs inspector in New York City. This position placed Melville in the center of one of the most corrupt bureaucracies of postwar America, but it provided him with a steady income and the freedom to write without the pressure of pleasing a public that had long forgotten him. Clarel, the narrative of a young theologian’s attempt to regain the faith he lost during his years of study, is Melville’s personal effort to come to terms with the philosophical uncertainties that troubled him throughout his life.

The poem is divided into four parts, each part culminating in death. Beginning in Jerusalem, the four parts take Clarel and a changing band of companions and guides on a symbolic, circular journey in an ambiguous search for meaning across a debilitated and infertile wasteland.

In part 1, Clarel is repulsed by the barrenness of Jerusalem and overwhelmed by feelings of loneliness. Instead of the traditional vision of a sacred and glorious city, Clarel is confronted by “Dismantled, torn,/ Disastrous houses, ripe for fall,” dwellings that look like “plundered tombs.” A bleak and confusing maze of walls and enclosures, Jerusalem seems a city forsaken by God and hostile toward humanity. Disillusioned by the decay and disorder of the city, Clarel is overwhelmed by the diversity of people and beliefs he encounters in Jerusalem. He feels surrounded by people “in each degree/ Of craze, whereto some creed is key,” people who, in the privacy of their personal visions, “Walk like somnambulists abroad.”

In an effort to clarify the confusion he feels in Jerusalem, Clarel seeks spiritual guides. While wandering in the dry, stony lands outside the city’s walls, and while visiting the faded monuments and shrines of the ancient city, he meets Nehemiah, a millenarian dispenser of tracts, who has traveled from America to be witness to the Second Coming; Celio, a hunchbacked renegade Catholic, whose sudden, unexplained death seems the terrible price of religious rebellion; Vine, a sensitive, meditative, middle-aged American, who is reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne; and Rolfe, an assertive, argumentative American, who is a partial self-portrait of Melville. During the course of the poem’s narrative, Clarel turns to these and other possible guides whom he meets along the way for help, but none of these diverse characters is able to provide him with the guidance he desires.

Clarel’s desperate yearning for some hope in existence is answered when he meets a beautiful young Jewish woman named Ruth with whom he immediately falls in love. Impulsively he asks for her hand in marriage, but their courtship is interrupted by the death of Ruth’s father, and Clarel decides to pass the required time of mourning by joining his newfound guides in a pilgrimage toward the Dead Sea.

In part 2, Clarel and the other pilgrims are joined by Derwent, a melioristic Anglican priest, and together they journey down from Mount Olivet toward Jericho. Their physical descent is paralleled by a building sense of doom. When they reach Mount Quarantania, the traditional site of Christ’s temptation, Mortmain, a cynic whose belief in human progress has been destroyed by the failure of the French Revolution of 1848, leaves the group to spend the night alone under the mountain. As Mortmain leaves, the group is joined by the geologist Margoth, who argues coldly for the primacy of science. Set amid the formidable and barren landscape of the Siddom Plain, part 2 moves through ominous banks of fog toward the encampment on the shores of the Dead Sea. There Mortmain, visibly aged by his nightlong vigil, recklessly drinks the bitter water of the Dead Sea, “Hades water shed…the Sodom waters dead,” and has a vision of his own coming demise. That night, Nehemiah, hallucinating a vision of the New Jerusalem, walks somnambulistically into the waters. The grim pilgrims find his corpse the next morning floating near the shore.

In part 3, the pilgrims ascend the rugged Judah ridge toward Mar Saba, the ancient Coptic monastery and oasis. At Mar Saba, the starkness of the pilgrims’ journey is relieved by the conviviality of the monks, the comfortable quarters, and the plentiful food and drink. The humanism of this center of Christian belief stands in contrast to the closed doors and dust-covered shrines of Jerusalem. A lone, majestic palm, which grows from the side of the mountain, becomes a problematic symbol of the hope for immortality, but the reader is reminded that the intricate passages of Mar Saba lead down as well as up. In this place of reassessment, the pilgrims once again encounter death when they discover the corpse of Mortmain, its open eyes transfixed upon the sacred palm and an eagle feather at its lips. Mortmain’s ambiguous demise, which hints at both beatitude and annihilation, leaves the poem’s young protagonist feeling “Suspended ‘twixt the heaven and hell.”

In part 4, the pilgrims stop in Bethlehem on their return journey to Jerusalem. In this portion of their journey they are joined by two others: Agath, an illiterate Greek seaman who has survived the brutality of a hostile world through the tenacity of his will, and Ungar, an embittered Confederate who has fled America and the defeat of his cause to become a soldier of fortune. Clarel, who has had second thoughts and dark premonitions regarding his betrothal to Ruth while on his journey, discovers that she has died while he was traveling. Confused and alone, Clarel is last seen joining another band of pilgrims.

The poem concludes with a brief epilogue that asks “If Luther’s day expand to Darwin’s year,/ Shall that exclude the hope—foreclose the fear?” Critics have argued over the interpretation of the poem’s conclusion. Some see in it a Melville who, near the end of his life, had made peace with the conflict between disbelief and belief. Others, however, see in it a reaffirmation of Melville’s lifelong inability to resolve this conflict and his conviction that it could not be resolved.

Forms and Devices

Clarel is a massive work, comprising more than eighteen thousand lines of iambic tetrameter in which lines rhyme at irregular intervals. Melville’s decision to use short octosyllabic lines and his decision to create a rhyme at the end of each short line, a particularly difficult task in English, decrease the readability of the poem and help to explain why many critics have dismissed Clarel as bad poetry; however, others have argued that the limitations of the form Melville selected are the result of a conscious effort on the author’s part to force his reader to experience an uneasiness similar to the spiritual disorientation that confronts the protagonist. In a sense, the reader feels as trapped between the narrow walls of the iambic tetrameter lines as Clarel feels between the conflicting pressures of faith and cynicism.

The poem is divided into four parts of roughly equivalent length. The poem’s 150 cantos average about 120 lines each. The cantos are thematically or narratively gathered in groups of two to five and are irregularly divided into sections that indicate a minor change in subject or merely relieve visual monotony. Within each of the four parts, the groups of cantos form a pattern of nine to ten movements. Some slight relief from the confines of the poem’s rigid structure is provided by more than forty short lyric pieces—hymns, songs, invocations, and chants—that are interspersed throughout the narrative.

Although limited in its prosody, the poem is rich in symbolic imagery. The topography of the Holy Land provides Melville with his most powerful images. The pilgrims’ physical journey down toward the Dead Sea, 1,300 feet below sea level, mirrors their increasing gloom, just as their ascent to Mar Saba’s towers offers a brief hope of beatitude. Throughout their journey the sterile images of the desert remind the reader of the sterility that plagues their spirits. The walls and winding alleyways of Jerusalem echo the confusion of the young protagonist; the brackish waters of the Dead Sea serve as a frightening image of annihilation. Most of the poem’s landscape is a wilderness, separated from the civilization the pilgrims have voluntarily abandoned. It is at once a place of potential revelation and a place of possible spiritual death. The bleakness of the desert landscape is frequently juxtaposed with the pilgrims’ fond memories of lusher landscapes at home, the green fields, orchards, and of families that they have left in their pasts. The poem’s setting also offers numerous biblically significant sites that provide Melville with opportunities to elaborate on his theological themes. Most often, however, these holy places are portrayed as ruined or defiled, becoming additional symbols of disillusionment and loss of faith. Finally, it is not surprising that the author of Moby Dick (1851) uses sea images throughout his desert poem, for in his earlier work Melville frequently described the vast loneliness of the oceans as a kind of wasteland.

Freed from the pressure to make his writing pay, Melville clearly did not overly concern himself with the commercial potential of Clarel; however, his narrative does relate to some important literary and social interests of his time: the popularity of letters from abroad, which related travelers’ reactions to famous places; nineteenth century Protestant America’s fascination with the Holy Land; and the still popular English genre of the Oriental romance.

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