The Poems of Herman Melville

Douglas Robillard

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN:
  9780873386609
• eBook ISBN:
  9781612778167
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Unlike his fiction, which has been popular and often reprinted, Melville's poetry remains obscure. The last "collected poems" appeared in 1947 and "selected poems" in the 1970s, and only two books dealing exclusively with Melville's poetry have appeared, both published in the 1970s. In this revised edition of his Poems of Herman Melville, Douglas Robillard updates the scholarship on the poetry through his introduction and notes and makes a case for revised estimate of the importance of Melville as a poet. The Poems of Herman Melville contains entire texts of "Battle-Pieces" (1866), "John Marr and Other Sailors" (1888), and "Timoleon" (1891). Selected cantos from "Clarel" are reprinted with accompanying notes and commentary.

Battle-Pieces

[With few exceptions, the Pieces in this volume originated in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond. They were composed without reference to collective arrangement, but, being brought together in review, naturally fall into the order assumed.

The events and incidents of the conflict—making up a whole, in varied amplitude, corresponding with the geographical area covered by the war—from these but a few themes have been taken, such as for any cause chanced to imprint themselves upon the mind.

The aspects which the strife as a memory assumes are as manifold as are the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance. Yielding instinctively, one after another, to feelings not inspired from any one source exclusively, and unmindful, without purporting to be, of consistency, I seem, in most of these verses, to have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the contrasted airs which wayward winds have played upon the strings.]

THE PORTENT
(1859)

Hanging from the beam,

Slowly swaying (such the law),

Gaunt the shadow on your green,

Shenandoah!

The cut is on the crown

(Lo, John Brown),

And the stabs shall heal no more.

Hidden in the cap

Is the anguish none can draw;

So your future veils its face,

Shenandoah!

But the streaming beard is shown

(Weird John Brown),

The meteor of the war.

MISGIVINGS
(1860)

When ocean-clouds over inland hills

Sweep storming in late autumn brown,

And horror the sodden valley fills,

And the spire falls crashing in the town,

I muse upon my country’s ills—

The tempest bursting from the waste of Time

On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.

Nature’s dark side is heeded now—

(Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)—

A child may read the moody brow

Of yon black mountain lone.

With shouts the torrents down the gorges go,

And storms are formed behind the storm we feel:

The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.

THE CONFLICT OF CONVICTIONS”^a
(1860–61)

On starry heights

A bugle wails the long recall;

Derision stirs the deep abyss,

Heaven’s ominous silence over all.

Return, return, O eager Hope,

And face man’s latter fall.

Events, they make the dreamers quail;

Satan’s old age is strong and hale,

A disciplined captain, gray in skill,

And Raphael a white enthusiast still;

Dashed aims, at which Christ’s martyrs pale,

Shall Mammon’s slaves fulfill?

(Dismantle the fort,

Cut down the fleet—

Battle no more shall be!

While the fields for fight in æons to come

Congeal beneath the sea.)

The terrors of truth and dart of death

To faith alike are vain;

Though comets, gone a thousand years,

Return again,

Patient she stands—she can no more—

And waits, nor heeds she waxes hoar.

(At a stony gate,

A statue of stone,

Weed overgrown—

Long ‘twill wait!)

But God his former mind retains,

Confirms his old decree;

The generations are inured to pains,

And strong Necessity

Surges, and heaps Time’s strand with wrecks.

The People spread like a weedy grass,

The thing they will bring to pass,

And prosper to the apoplex.

The rout it herds around the heart,

The ghost is yielded in the gloom;

Kings wag their heads—Now save thyself

Who wouldst rebuild the world in bloom.

(Tide-mark

And top of the ages’ strife,

Verge where they called the world to come,

The last advance of life—

Ha ha, the rust on the Iron Dome!)

Nay, but revere the hid event;

In the cloud a sword is girded on,

I mark a twinkling in the tent

Of Michael the warrior one.

Senior wisdom suits not now,

The light is on the youthful brow.

(Ay, in caves the miner see:

His forehead bears a blinking light;

Darkness so he feebly braves—

A meagre wight!)

But He who rules is old—is old;

Ah! faith is warm, but heaven with age is cold.

(Ho ho, ho ho,

The cloistered doubt

Of olden times

Is blurted out!)

The Ancient of Days forever is young,

Forever the scheme of Nature thrives;

I know a wind in purpose strong—

It spins against the way it drives.

What if the gulfs their slimed foundations bare?

So deep must the stones be hurled

Whereon the throes of ages rear

The final empire and the happier world.

(The poor old Past,

The Future’s slave,

She drudged through pain and crime

To bring about the blissful Prime,

Then—perished. There’s a grave!)

Power unanointed may come—

Dominion (unsought by the free)

And the Iron Dome,

Stronger for stress and strain,

Fling her huge shadow athwart the main;

But the Founders’ dream shall flee.

Age after age shall be

As age after age has been,

(From man’s changeless heart their way they win);

And death be busy with all who strive—

Death, with silent negative.

YEA AND NAY—

EACH HATH HIS SAY;

BUT GOD HE KEEPS THE MIDDLE WAY.

NONE WAS BY

WHEN HE SPREAD THE SKY;

WISDOM IS VAIN, AND PROPHESY.

APATHY AND ENTHUSIASM
(1860–61)

I

O the clammy cold November,

And the winter white and dead,

And the terror dumb with stupor,

And the sky a sheet of lead;

And events that came resounding

With the cry that All was lost,

Like the thunder-cracks of massy ice

In intensity of frost—

Bursting one upon another

Through the horror of the calm.

The paralysis of arm

In the anguish of the heart;

And th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Battle-Pieces
• Excerpts from Clarel
• John Marr and Other Sailors
• Timoleon, Etc.
• Bibliography