Herman Melville- Complete Poems

by Herman Melville

A jewel-block they’ll make of me tomorrow,

  Pendant pearl from the yard-arm-end

  Like the ear-drop I gave to Bristol Molly—

  O, ’tis me, not the sentence they’ll suspend.

  Ay, Ay, all is up; and I must up too

  Early in the morning, aloft from alow.

  On an empty stomach now never it would do.

  They’ll give me a nibble—bit o’ biscuit ere I go.

  Sure, a messmate will reach me the last parting cup;

  But, turning heads away from the hoist and the belay,

  Heaven knows who will have the running of me up!

  No pipe to those halyards.—But aren’t it all sham?

  A blur’s in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am.

  A hatchet to my hawser? all adrift to go?

  The drum roll to grog, and Billy never know?

  But Donald he has promised to stand by the plank;

  So I’ll shake a friendly hand ere I sink.

  But—no! It is dead then I’ll be, come to think.—

  I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank.

  And his cheek it was like the budding pink.

  But me they’ll lash in hammock, drop me deep.

  Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream

  fast asleep.

  I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?

  Just ease these darbies at the wrist,

  And roll me over fair.

  I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.

  Camoens

  1

  (Before Tasso)

  RESTLESS, restless, craving rest,

  Forever must I fan this fire,

  Forever in flame on flame aspire?

  Yea, for the god demands thy best.

  The world with endless beauty teems,

  And thought evokes new-worlds of dreams:

  Then hunt the flying herds of themes.

  And fan, yet fan thy fervid fire

  Until the crucibled ore shall show

  That fire can purge as well as glow

  In ordered ardor nobly strong,

  Flame to the height of ancient song.

  2

  (After Tasso)

  Camoens in the hospital

  Suggested by a bust of that poet

  What now avails the pageant verse,

  Trophies and arms with music borne?

  Base is the world; and some rehearse

  How noblest meet ignoble scorn.

  Vain now thy ardor, vain thy fire,

  Delirium mere, and mad unsound desire:

  Fate’s knife hath ripped the chorded lyre.

  Exhausted by the exacting lay,

  Thou dost but fall a surer prey

  To wile and guile ill understood;

  While they who work them, fair in face,

  Still keep their strength in prudent place,

  And claim they worthier run life’s race,

  Serving high God with useful good.

  The Continents

  FROM bright Stamboul Death crosses o’er;

  Beneath the cypress evermore

  His camp he pitches by the shore

  Of Asia old.

  Requiting this unsocial mood

  Stamboul’s immyrtled multitude

  Bless Allah and the sherbert good

  And Europe hold.

  Even so the cleaving Bosphorous parts

  Life and Death.—Dissembling hearts!

  Over the gulf the yearning starts

  To meet—infold!

  The Dust-Layers

  ABREAST through town by Nile they go

  With water-skins the dust to lay,

  A soggy set in sorry row

  Squeezing their skins in bag-pipe way.

  With droning rhyme that times the twitch

  They squirt the water, squirt and switch

  In execrable play!

  Osiris! what indignity,

  In open eye of day,

  Offered the arch majesty

  Of Thotmes passed away;

  The atoms of his pomp no prouder

  Than to be blown about in powder,

  Or made a muddy clay!

  Falstaff’s Lament

  Over Prince Hal Become Henry V

  ONE that I cherished,

  Yea, loved as a son—

  Up early, up late with,

  My promising one:

  No use in good nurture,

  None, lads, none!

  Here on this settle

  He wore the true crown,

  King of good fellows,

  And Fat Jack was one—

  Now, Beadle of England

  In formal array—

  Best fellow alive

  On a throne flung away!

  Companions and cronies

  Keep fast and lament;—

  Come drawer, more sack here

  To drown discontent;

  For now intuitions

  Shall wither to codes,

  Pragmatical morals

  Shall libel the gods.—

  One I instructed,

  Yea, talked to—alone:

  Precept—example

  Clean away thrown!

  (Sorrow makes thirsty:

  Sack, drawer, more sack!)

  One that I prayed for,

  I, Honest Jack!—

  To bring down these gray hairs—

  To cut his old pal!

  But, I’ll be magnanimous—

  Here’s to thee, Hal!

  Fruit and Flower Painter

  SHE dens in a garret

  As void as a drum;

  In lieu of plum-pudding—

  She paints the plum!

  No use in one’s grieving,

  The shops you must suit:

  Broken hearts are but potsherds—

  Paint flowers and fruit!

  How whistles her garret,

  A seive for the snows:

  She hums O fortuna

  And—paints the rose!

  December is howling,

  But feign it a flute:

  Help on the deceiving—

  Paint flowers and fruit!

  Give me the nerve

  GIVE me the nerve

  That never will swerve

  Running out on life’s ledges of danger;

  Mine, mine be the nerve

  That in peril will serve

  Since life is to safety a stranger.

  When roaring below

  The cataracts go

  And tempests are over me scudding;

  Give, give me the calm

  That is better than balm

  And the courage that keepeth new-budding.

  Gold in the mountain

  GOLD in the mountain

  And gold in the glen,

  And greed in the heart,

  Heaven having no part,

  And unsatisfied men.

  Hearts-of-gold

  TWERE pity, if true,

  What the pewterer said—

  Hearts-of-gold be few.

  Howbeit, when snug in my bed

  And the fire-light flickers and yellows,

  I dream of the hearts-of-gold sped—

  The Falernian fellows—

  Hafiz and Horace

  And Beranger—all
/>   Dexterous tumblers eluding the Fall.

  Fled? can be sped?

  But the marygold’s morris

  Is danced o’er your head;

  But your memory mellows,

  Embalmed and becharmed

  Hearts-of-gold and good fellows!

  Honor

  WITH jeweled tusks and damask housings

  August the elephants appear:

  Grandees, trumpets, banners, soldiers—

  One flame from van to rear!

  Bid by India’s King they travel

  In solemn embassage to-day,

  To meet the Diamond from Golconda

  The Great Find of Cathay.

  O the honor, O the homage!

  But, methinks, ’t were nice,

  Would they say but How-de-do?

  To the Little Pearl of Price.

  Immolated

  CHILDREN of my happier prime,

  When One yet lived with me, and threw

  Her rainbow over life and time,

  Even Hope, my bride, and mother to you!

  O, nurtured in sweet pastoral air,

  And fed on flowers and light, and dew

  Of morning meadows—spare, Ah, spare

  Reproach; spare, and upbraid me not

  That, yielding scarse to reckless mood

  But jealous of your future lot,

  I sealed you in a fate subdued.

  Have I not saved you from the drear

  Theft and ignoring which need be

  The triumph of the insincere

  Unanimous Mediocrity?

  Rest therefore, free from all despite,

  Snugged in the arms of comfortable night.

  In a nutshell

  TAKE a reef, take a reef

  In your wisdom: be brief.

  Well then—well-a-day!

  Wag the world how it may,

  The knaves will be tricking

  And fools still be kicking,

  And Grief, the sad Thief

  Will forever Joy’s pocket be picking!

  In the Hall of Marbles

  (Lines recalled from a destroyed poem)

  IF genius, turned to sordid ends

  Ye count to glory lost,

  How with mankind that flouts the aims

  Time’s Attic years engrossed?

  Waxes the world so rich and old?

  Richer and narrower, age’s way?

  But, primal fervors all displaced,

  Our arts but serve the clay.

  This plaint the sibyls unconsoled renew:

  Man fell from Eden, fell from Athens too.

  In the jovial age of old

  IN the jovial age of old

  Named from gold,

  Gold was none for Danæ’s shower;

  While forever silvery fell

  Down in dell

  Bridal blossoms from love’s bower.

  In the old Farm House

  The Ghost

  DEAD of night, dead of night,

  Living souls are a’bed;

  Dead of night, dead of night,

  And I sit with the dead.

  He laughs in white sheet,

  And I, I laugh too.

  Tis Shakspeare, good fellow—

  And Falstaff in view.

  In the Paupers’ Turnip-Field

  CROW, in pulpit lone and tall,

  Of yon charred hemlock grimly dead,

  Why on me in preachment call—

  Me, by nearer preachment led

  Here in homily of my hoe.

  The hoe, the hoe,

  My heavy hoe

  Which earthward bows me, to foreshow

  A mattock heavier than the hoe.

  Inscription

  For the Dead

  At Fredericksburgh

  A DREADFUL glory lights an earnest end;

  In jubilee the patriot ghosts ascend;

  Transfigured at the rapturous height

  Of their passionate feat of arms,

  Death to the brave’s a starry night,—

  Strewn their vale of death with palms.

  Madam Mirror and

  The Wise Virgins an answer

  Madam Mirror

  WITH wrecks in a garret I’m stranded,

  Where, no longer returning a face,

  I take to reflections the deeper

  On memories far to retrace.

  In me have all people confided,

  The maiden her charms has displayed

  And truths unrevealed and unuttered

  To me have been freely betrayed.

  Some tales I might tell of the toilet

  Did not tenderness make me forget;

  But the glance of proud beauty slow fading

  It dies not away from me yet;

  Nor the eyes, too long ceasing to shine,—

  Soliciting,—well knowing that mine

  Were too candid to flatter when met.

  But pledged unto trueness forever,

  My confessional close as the friar’s,

  How sacred to me are the trusting.

  Here nothing for scandal transpires.

  But ah, what of all that is perished,

  Nor less shall again be, again!

  What pangs after parties of pleasure,

  What smiles but disclosures of pain!

  O, tears of the hopeless unloved,

  O, start at old age drawing near—

  And what shadows more tragical far

  Like clouds on a lake have been here!

  Though lone in a loft I must languish

  Far from closet and parlor at strife,

  Content I escape from the anguish

  Of the Real and the Seeming in life.

  The Wise Virgins to Madam Mirror

  MADAM Mirror, believe we are sorry for you;

  But ah, how console you or cheer!

  We are young, we go skipping, but you

  Are an old and forlorn garreteer!

  Tis we view the world through an arbor,

  The bride with the bridegroom appears;

  But you, retrospecting through tunnels

  See but widowers and widows on biers!

  To us that is foreign—in no sense will pair

  With cake, wine and diamonds, and blossoms in hair!

  But age!—Ah, the crow will scarce venture

  To tread near the eyes flashing bold;

  He’s a craven; and youth is immortal;

  ’Tis the elderly only grow old!

  But, Dame, for all misty recurrings

  To beacons befogged in the past—

  Less dismal they are, dame, than dubious;

  Nor joy leaves us time to forecast.

  Though the battered we hardly would banter,

  And never will ridicule use,

  Let us say that a twilight of inklings

  Is worth scarse the Pope’s old shoes.

  For the rest, the skeletons meeting glass eyes,

  Let a parable serve, if by chance it applies.

  A brace of green goggles they gabbled, old elves

  Touching very queer spectacles they had descried;

  But the queerest of all were the goggles themselves,

  Rusty, fusty shagreen of the puckered fish-hide!

  But you
, Madam Mirror, not here we type you,

  Nor twit you for being a glass

  With a druggish green blur and a horrible way

  Of distorting all objects, alas!

  Ourselves, so symmetric, our Cavaliers tell,

  What, squint us to witches with broomsticks to sell!

  O yes, we are giddy, we whirl in youth’s waltz,

  But a fig for Reflections when crookedly false!

  The Medallion

  (In Villa Albani &c)

  SINCE seriousness in many a face

  Open or latent, you may trace—

  The ground-expression, wherein close

  All smiles at last; and ever still

  The revelation of repose;

  Which sums the life, and tells the mood

  Of inmost self in solitude—

  Then wherefore, World, of bards complain

  Whose verse the years and fate imbue

  With reveries where no glozings reign—

  An even unelated strain

  In candor grave, to nature due?

  Merry Ditty of the Sad Man

  LET us all take to singing

  Who feel the life-thong;

  Let us all take to singing,

  And this be the song—

  Nothing like singing