Luxuriant this wilderness. But to its denizen, a friend left behind anywhere in the world, seemed not alone absent to sight, but an absentee from existence.
Though John Marr’s shipmates could not all have departed life, yet as subjects of meditation they were like phantoms of the dead. As the growing sense of his environment threw him more and more upon retrospective musings, these phantoms, next to those of his wife and child, became spiritual companions, losing something of their first indistinctness and putting on at last a dim semblance of mute life. And they were lit by that aureola circling over any object of the affections in the past for reunion with which an imaginative heart passionately yearns.
He invokes these visionary ones, striving, as it were, to get into verbal communion with them; or, under yet stronger illusion, reproaching them for their silence:—
Since as in night’s deck-watch ye show,
Why, lads, so silent here to me,
Your watchmate of times long ago?
Once, for all the darkling sea,
You your voices raised how clearly,
Striking in when tempest sung;
Hoisting up the storm-sail cheerly,
Life is storm:—let storm! you rung.
Taking things as fated merely,
Child-like though the world ye spanned;
Nor holding unto life too dearly,
Ye who held your lives in hand:
Skimmers, who on oceans four
Petrels were, and larks ashore.
O, not from memory lightly flung,
Forgot, like strains no more availing,
The heart to music haughtier strung;
Nay, frequent near me, never staling,
Whose good feeling kept ye young.
Like tides that enter creek or stream,
Ye come, ye visit me; or seem
Swimming out from seas of faces,
Alien myriads memory traces,
To enfold me in a dream!
I yearn as ye. But rafts that strain,
Parted, shall they lock again?
Twined we were, entwined, then riven,
Ever to new embracements driven,
Shifting gulf-weed of the main!
And how if one here shift no more,
Lodged by the flinging surge ashore?
Nor less, as now, in eve’s decline,
Your shadowy fellowship is mine.
Ye float around me, form and feature:—
Tattooings, ear-rings, love-locks curled;
Barbarians of man’s simpler nature,
Unworldly servers of the world.
Yea, present all, and dear to me,
Though shades, or scouring China’s sea.
Whither, whither, merchant-sailors,
Whitherward now in roaring gales?
Competing still, ye huntsman-whalers,
In leviathan’s wake what boat prevails?
And man-of-war’s men, whereaway?
If now no dinned drum beat to quarters
On the wilds of midnight waters—
Foemen looming through the spray;
Do yet your gangway lanterns, streaming,
Vainly strive to pierce below,
When, tilted from the slant plank gleaming,
A brother you see to darkness go?
But, gunmates lashed in shotted canvas,
If where long watch-below ye keep,
Never the shrill “All hands up hammocks!”
Breaks the spell that charms your sleep;
And summoning trumps might vainly call,
And booming guns implore—
A beat, a heart-beat musters all,
One heart-beat at heart-core.
It musters. But to clasp, retain;
To see you at the halyards main—
To hear your chorus once again!
Bridegroom Dick
(1876)
SUNNING ourselves in October on a day
Balmy as Spring though the year was in decay,
I lading my pipe, she stirring her tea,
My old woman she says to me,
“Feel ye, old man, how the season mellows?”
And why should I not, blessed heart alive,
Here mellowing myself, past sixty-five,
To think o’ the May-time o’ pennoned young fellows
This stripped old hulk here for years may survive.
Ere yet, long ago, we were spliced, Bonny Blue,
(Silvery it gleams down the moon-glade o’ time;
Ah, sugar in the bowl and berries in the prime!)
Coxswain I o’ the Commodore’s crew,—
Under me the fellows that manned his fine gig,
Spinning him ashore, a king in full fig.
Chirrupy even when crosses rubbed me,
Bridegroom-Dick lieutenants dubbed me.
Pleasant at a yarn, Bob o’ Linkum in a song,
Diligent in duty and nattily arrayed,
Favored I was, wife, and fleeted right along;
And though but a tot for such a tall grade,
A high quarter-master at last I was made.
All this, old lassie, you have heard before,
But you listen again for the sake e’en o’ me;
No babble stales o’ the good times o’ yore
To Joan, if Darby the babbler be.
Babbler?—o’ what? Addled brains they forget!
O—quarter-master I; yes, the signals set,
Hoisted the ensign, mended it when frayed;
Polished up the binnacle—minded the helm;
And prompt every order blithely obeyed.
To me would the officers say a word cheery—
Break through the starch o’ the quarter-deck realm;
His coxswain late, so the Commodore’s pet.
Ay, and in night-watches long and weary,
Bored nigh to death with the naval etiquette,
Yearning, too, for fun, some younker, a cadet,
Dropping for time each vain bumptious trick,
Boy-like would unbend to Bridegroom Dick.
But a limit there was—a check, d’ye see:
Those fine young aristocrats knew their degree.
Well, stationed aft where their lordships keep,
Seldom going forward excepting to sleep—
I, boozing now on by-gone years,
My betters recall along with my peers.
Recall them? Wife, but I see them plain:
Alive, alert, every man stirs again.
Ay, and again on the lee-side pacing,
My spy-glass carrying, a truncheon in show,
Turning at the taffrail, my footsteps retracing,
Proud in my duty, again methinks I go.
And Dave, Dainty Dave, I mark where he stands,
Our trim sailing-master, to time the high-noon,
That thingumbob sextant perplexing eyes and hands,
Squinting at the sun, or twigging o’ the moon;
Then, touching his cap to Old Chock-a-Block
Commanding the quarter-deck—“Sir, twelve o’clock.”
Where sails he now, that trim sailing-master,
Slender, yes, as the ship’s sky-s’l pole?
Dimly I mind me of some sad disaster:—
Dainty Dave was dropped from the navy-roll!
And ah, for old Lieutenant Chock-a-Block—
Fast, wife, chock-fast to death’s black dock!
Buffeted about the obstreperous ocean,
Fleeted his life, if lagged his promotion.
Little girl, the
y are all, all gone, I think,
Leaving Bridegroom Dick here with lids that wink.
Where is Ap Catesby?—The fights fought of yore
Famed him, and laced him with epaulets, and more.
But fame is a wake that after-wakes cross,
And the waters wallow all, and laugh Where’s the loss?
But John Bull’s bullet in his shoulder bearing
Ballasted Ap in his long seafaring.
The middies they ducked to the man who had messed
With Decatur in the gun-room, or forward pressed
Fighting beside Perry, Hull, Porter and the rest.
Humped veteran o’ the Heart-o’-Oak War,
Moored long in haven where the old heroes are,
Never on you did the iron-clads jar!
Your open deck when the boarder assailed,
The frank old heroic hand-to-hand then availed.
But where’s Guert Gan? Still heads he the van?
As before Vera-Cruz, when he dashed splashing through
The blue rollers sunned, in his brave gold-and-blue,
And, ere his cutter in keel took the strand,
Aloft waved his sword on the hostile land!
Went up the cheering, the quick chanticleering;
All hands vying—all colors flying:
“Cock-a-doodle-do!” and “Row, boys, row!”
“Hey, Starry Banner!” “Hi, Santa Anna!”—
Old Scott’s young dash at Mexico.
Fine forces o’ the land, fine forces o’ the sea,
Fleet, army, and flotilla—tell, heart o’ me,
Tell, if you can, whereaway now they be!
But, ah, how to speak of the hurricane unchained—
The Union’s strands parted in the hawser over-strained;
Our Flag blown to shreds, anchors gone altogether—
The dashed fleet o’ States in Secession’s foul weather.
Lost in the smother o’ that wide public stress,
In hearts, private hearts, what ties there were snapped!
Tell, Hal—vouch, Will, o’ the ward-room mess,
On you how the riving thunder-bolt clapped.
With a bead in your eye and beads in your glass
And a grip o’ the flipper, it was part and pass:
“Hal, must it be? Well, if come indeed the shock,
To North or to South let the victory cleave,
Vaunt it he may on his dung-hill the cock,
But Uncle Sam’s eagle never crow will, believe.”
Sentiment: ay, while suspended hung all,
Ere the guns against Sumter opened there the ball,
And partners were taken, and the red dance began,
War’s red dance o’ death!—Well, we, to a man,
We sailors o’ the North, wife, how could we lag?—
Strike with your kin, and you stick to the Flag!
But to sailors o’ the South that easy way was barred.
To some, dame, believe, (and I speak o’ what I know)
Wormwood the trial and the Uzzite’s black shard;
And the faithfuller the heart, the crueller the throe.
Duty? it pulled with more than one string,
This way and that, and anyhow a sting.
The Flag and your kin, how be true unto both?
If either plight ye keep, then ye break the other troth.
But elect here they must, though the casuists were out:
Decide—hurry up—and throttle every doubt.
Of all these thrills thrilled at kelson, and throes,
Little felt the shoddyites a’toasting o’ their toes;
In mart and bazar Lucre chuckled the huzza,
Coining the dollars in the bloody mint o’ war.
But in men, gray knights o’ the Order o’ Scars,
And brave boys bound by vows unto Mars,
Nature grappled Honor, intertwisting in the strife:—
But some cut the knot with a thoroughgoing knife.
For how when the drums beat? how in the fray
In Hampton Roads on the fine balmy day?
There a lull, wife, befell—drop o’ silence in the din.
Let us enter that silence ere the belchings rebegin.—
Through a ragged rift aslant in the cannonade’s smoke
An iron-clad reveals her repellent broadside
Bodily intact. But a frigate, all oak,
Shows honeycombed by shot, and her deck crimson-dyed.
And a trumpet from port of the iron-clad hails
Summoning the other whose flag never trails:—
“Surrender that frigate, Will! Surrender,
Or I will sink her—ram, and end her!”
’Twas Hal. And Will, from the naked heart-o’-oak,
Will, the old messmate, minus trumpet, spoke,
Informally intrepid—“Sink her and be damned.”*
Enough. Gathering way, the iron-clad rammed.
The frigate, heeling over, on the wave threw a dusk.
Not sharing in the slant, the clapper of her bell
The fixed metal struck—uninvoked struck the knell
Of the Cumberland stilettoed by the Merrimac’s tusk;
While, broken in the wound underneath the gun-deck,
Like a sword-fish’s blade in leviathan waylaid
The tusk was left infixed in the fast-foundering wreck.
There, dungeoned in the cockpit, the wounded go down,
And the Chaplain with them. But the surges uplift
The prone dead from deck, and for moment they drift
Washed with the swimmers, and the spent swimmers drown.
Nine fathom did she sink,—erect, though hid from light
Save her colors unsurrendered and spars that kept the height.
Nay, pardon, old aunty!—Wife, never let it fall,
That big started tear that hovers on the brim;
I forgot about your nephew and the Merrimac’s ball;
No more then of her since it summons up him.
But talk o’ fellows’ hearts in the wine’s genial cup:—
Trap them in the fate, jam them in the strait,
Guns speak their hearts then, and speak right up.
The troublous colic o’ intestine war
It sets the bowels o’ affection ajar.
But, lord, old dame, so spins the whizzing world,
A humming-top, ay, for the little boy-gods
Flogging it well with their smart little rods,
Tittering at time and the coil uncurled.
Now, now, Sweetheart, you sidle away,
No, never you like that kind o’ gay:
But sour if I get, giving truth her due,
Honey-sweet forever, wife, will Dick be to you!
But avast with the War! Why recall racking days
Since set up anew are the ship’s started stays?
Nor less, though the gale we have left behind,
Well may the heave o’ the sea remind.
It irks me now, as it troubled me then,
To think o’ the fate in the madness o’ men.
If Dick was with Farragut on the night-river
When the boom-chain we burst in the fire-raft’s glare
That blood-dyed the visage as red as the liver;
In the Battle for the Bay too if Dick had a share,
And saw one aloft a’piloting the war—
Trumpet in the whirlwind, a Providence in place—
Our Admiral old whom the Captains huzza,
Dick joys in the man nor brags about the race.
But better, wife, I like to booze on the
days
Ere the Old Order foundered in these very frays,
And tradition was lost and we learned strange ways.
Often I think on the brave cruises then;
Re-sailing them in memory, I hail the press o’ men
On the gunned promenade where rolling they go
Ere the dog-watch expire and break up the show.
Herman Melville- Complete Poems Page 66