Herman Melville- Complete Poems
Page 85
When blue-devils throng!
Along, come along:
Nothing like singing
(The rhyme keep a’ringing),
Just nothing like singing,
No, nothing for sorrow but song!
Montaigne and his Kitten
HITHER, Blanche! Tis you and I.
Now that not a fool is by
To say we fool it—let us fool!
We, you know, in mind are one,
Alumni of no fagging school;
Superfluous business still we shun;
And ambition we let go,
The while poor dizzards strain and strive,
Rave and slave, drudge and drive,
Chacing ever, to and fro,
After ends that seldom gain
Scant exemption from life’s pain.
But preachment proses, and so I,
Blanche, round your furred neck let me tie
This Order, with brave ribbon, see,—
The King he pinned it upon me.
But hark ye, sweeting,—well-a-day!
Forever shall ye purr this way—
Forever comfortable be?
Do’nt you wish now ’twas for ye,
Our grandiose eternity?
Pish! what fops we humans here,
W’ont admit within our sphere
The whitest doe, nor even thee—
We, the spotless humans, we!
Preaching, prosing—, scud and run,
Earnestness is far from fun.
Bless me, Blanche; we’ll frisk to-night,
Hearts be ours lilt and light—
Gambol, skip, and frolic, play:
Wise ones fool it while they may!
My jacket old
MY jacket old, with narrow seam—
When the dull day’s work is done
I dust it, and of Asia dream,
Old Asia of the sun!
There other garbs prevail;
Yea, lingering there, free robe and vest
Edenic Leisure’s age attest
Ere Work, alack, came in with Wail.
The New Ancient of Days
The Man of the Cave of Engihoul
(See Lyell’s Antiquity of Man and
Darwin’s Descent of Species)
THE man of bone confirms his throne
In cave where fossils be;
Outdating every mummy known,
Not older Cuvier’s mastodon,
Nor older much the sea:
Old as the Glacial Period, he;
And claims he calls to mind the day
When Thule’s king, by reindeer drawn,
His sleigh-bells jingling in icy morn,
Slid clean from the Pole to the Wetterhorn
Over frozen waters in May!
Oh, the man of the cave of Engihoul,
With Eld doth he dote and drule?
A wizzard one, his lore is none
Ye spell with A. B. C.;
But do-do tracks, all up and down
That slate he poreth much upon,
His algebra may be:—
Yea, there he cyphers and sums it free;
To ages ere Indus met ocean’s swell
Addeth æons ere Satan or Saturn fell.
His totals of time make an awful schism,
Old Chronos he pitches adown the abysm
Like a pebble down Carisbrook well.
Yea, the man of the cave of Engihoul
From Moses knocks under the stool.
In bas relief he late has shown
A horrible show, agree—
Megalosaurus, Iguanodon,
Palæotherium—Glypthæcon—
A Barnum show raree:
The vomit of slimy and sludgy sea,
Purposeless creatures, odd inchoate things
Which splashed through morasses on fleshly wings;
The cubs of Chaos, with eyes askance,
Preposterous griffins that squint at Chance
And Anarch’s cracked decree!
Oh the showman who dens in Engihoul,
Would he fright us, or quiz us, or fool?
But, needs to own, he takes a tone
Satiric on nobs, pardee!
“Though in ages whose term is yet to run,
Old Adam a seraph may have for son,
His gran’ther’s a crab, d’y’see!
And why cut your uncle the ape?” adds he:
“Your trick of scratching is borrowed from him,
Grimace and cunning, with many a whim,
Your fidgets and hypoes and each megrim—
All’s traced in the family tree!”
Ha, the wag of the cave of Engihoul:
Buss me, gorilla and ghoul!
Obstreperous grown he’d fain dethrone
Joe Smith, and e’en Joves Three;
Against even Jos and great Mahone
He flings his fossiliffer’s stone
And rattles his shanks for glee.
I’ll settle these parvenu fellows, he-he!
Diluvian Jove of Ducalion’s day—
A puling babe to the Pliocene clay!
He swears no Ens nor takes a name,
Commensurate is with the vasty claim
Of the protoplastic Fegee.
O, the spook of the Cave of Engihoul,
He flogs us and sends us to school.
Hyena of bone! Ah, beat him down,
Great Pope, with Peter’s key,
Ere the Grand Pan-Jam be overthrown
With Joe and Jos and great Mahone,
And the firmament mix with the sea;
And then, my masters, where should we be?
But the ogre of bone he snickers alone,
He grins for his godless glee.
“I have flung my stone, my fossil stone,
And your gods how they scamper,” saith he.
Imp! imp of the cave of Engihoul,
Shall he grin like the Gorgon and rule?
Old Age in his ailing
OLD Age in his ailing
At youth will be railing;
It scorns youth’s regaling;
Pooh-pooh it does, silly dream;
But me, the fool, save
From waxing so grave
As, reduced to skimmed milk, to slander the cream.
Pontoosuc
CROWNING a bluff where gleams the lake below,
Some pillared pines in well-spaced order stand
And like an open temple show.
And here in best of seasons bland,
Autumnal noon-tide, I look out
From dusk arcades on sunshine all about.
Beyond the Lake, in upland cheer,
Fields, pastoral fields and barns appear.
They skirt the hills where lonely roads
Revealed in links through tiers of woods
Wind up to indistinct abodes
And faery-peopled neighborhoods;
While further fainter mountains keep,
Hazed in romance impenetrably deep.
Look, corn in stacks, on many a farm,
And orchards ripe in languorous charm,
As dreamy Nature, feeling sure
Of all her genial labor done,
And the last mellow fruitage won,
Would idle out her term mature;
Reposing like a thing reclined
In kinship with man’s meditative mind.
For me, within the brown arcade—
Rich life, methought; sweet here in shade
And pleasant abroad in air!—But, nay,
A counter thought intrusive played,
A thought as old as thought itself,
And who shall lay it on the shelf!—
I felt the beauty bless the day
In opulence of autumn’s dower;
But evanescence will not stay!
A year ago was such an hour
As this, which but foreruns the blast
Shall sweep these live leaves to the dead ones past.
All dies!—
I stood in revery long.
Then, to forget death’s ancient wrong,
I turned me in the brown arcade,
And there by chance in lateral glade
I saw low tawny mounds in lines,
Relics of trunks of stately pines
Ranked erst in colonnades where, lo!
Erect succeeding pillars show!
All dies! and not alone
The aspiring trees and men and grass;
The poet’s forms of beauty pass,
And noblest deeds they are undone;
Even truth itself decays, and lo,
From truth’s sad ashes fraud and falsehood grow.
All dies!
The workman dies, and, after him, the work;
Like to these pines whose graves I trace,
Statue and statuary fall upon their face:
In very amaranths the worm doth lurk;
Even stars, Chaldæans say, have left their place.
Andes and Apalachee tell
Of havoc ere our Adam fell,
And present Nature as a moss doth show
On the ruins of the Nature of the æons of long ago.
But look—and hark!
Adown the glade,
Where light and shadow sport at will;
Who cometh vocal, and arrayed
As in the first pale tints of morn—
So pure, rose-clear, and fresh and chill!
Some ground-pine sprigs her brow adorn,
The earthy rootlets tangled clinging.
Over tufts of moss which dead things made,
Under vital twigs which danced or swayed,
Along she floats, and lightly singing:
“Dies, all dies!
The grass it dies, but in vernal rain
Up it springs and it lives again;
Over and over, again and again
It lives, it dies and it re-buds again.
Who sighs that all dies?
Summer and winter, and pleasure and pain
And everything everywhere in God’s reign,
They end, and anon they begin again:
Wane and wax, wax and wane:
Over and over and over amain;
End, ever end, and begin again—
End, ever end, and forever and ever begin again!”
She ceased, and nearer slid, and hung
In dewy guise; then softlier sung:
“Since light and shade are equal set
And all revolves, nor more ye know;
Ah, why should tears the pale cheek fret
For aught that waneth here below.
Let go, let go!”
With that, her warm lips thrilled me through,
She kissed me, while her chaplet cold
Its rootlets brushed against my brow
With all their humid clinging mould.
She vanished, leaving fragrant breath
And warmth and chill of wedded life and death.
Puzzlement
As to a figure left solitary on a unique
fragment of Greek basso-rilievo
A CRESCENT bow—a quiver thrown
Behind the shoulder. A huntress, own.
It needs be Artemis. But, nay,
It breathes too much of Eve’s sweet way,
And Artemis is high, austere,
Chill as her moon, a goddess mere.
She bends, and with one backward hand
Adjusts her buskin light,
The sidelong face upturned—how arch!
Sure, somebody meets her sight.
But never virgin on another
Virgin, or approaching brother
Turned a look like that, I wis.
Profane! if meant for Artemis.
Why, could one but piece out the stone—
Complete restore its primal state,
Some handsome fellow would be shown,
Some Laon she would fascinate
By that arch look.—
Nay—can it be?
Again methinks ’tis Artemis.
Rogue of a Greek! and is it she?
And Grand Art has it come to this?
Show’st thou the goddess, human yet—
The austere Artemis a coquette?
If so in sooth, some latter age
In faith’s decay begat such art—
Such impudence of sweet persiflage!
A Rail Road Cutting
Near Alexandria in 1855
PLUMP through tomb and catacomb
Rolls the Engine ripping;
Egypt’s ancient dust
Flies before the gust,
The Pyramid is slipping!
Too long inurned, Sesostris’s spurned,
What glory left to Isis
Mid loud acclaim to Watts his name?
Alack for Miriam’s spices!
Rammon
IN TOUCHING upon historical matters the romancer and poet have generously been accorded a certain license, elastic in proportion to the remoteness of the period embraced and consequent incompleteness and incertitude of our knowledge as to events, personages, and dates. It is upon this privilege, assumed for granted, that I here venture to proceed.
Rammon, not mentioned in canonic Scripture, the unrobust child of Solomon’s old age and inheriting its despondent philosophy, was immoderately influenced thereby. Vanity of vanities—such is this life. As to a translated life in some world hereafter—far be that thought! A primary law binds the universe. The worlds are like apples on the tree; in flavor and tint one apple perchance may somewhat differ from another, but all partake of the same sap. One of the worlds we know. And what find we here? Much good, a preponderance of good; that is, good it would be could it be winnowed from the associate evil that taints it. But evil is no accident. Like good it is an irremovable element. Bale out your individual boat, if you can, but the sea abides.
To Rammon then cessation of being was the desirable event. But desired or not, an end or what would seem to be an end, does come. There he would have rested—rested but for Buddha.
Solomon a very lax Hebrew did not altogether repell foreign ideas. It was in his time that reports of Buddha and the Buddhistic belief had, along with the recorded spices and pearls, been conveyed into Palestine by that travelled and learned Indian dame, not less communicative than inquisitive, the Princess of Sheba. Through her it was that the doctrine of the successive transmigration of souls came to circulate, along with legends of Ashtaroth and Chemosh, among a people whose theocratic lawgiver was silent as to any life to come. A significant abstention; and serving the more to invest with speculative novelty Buddha’s affirmative scheme. But profound doctrines not directly imparted by miracle, but through many removes and in end through the sprightly chat of a clever queen, though naturally enough they might supply a passing topic for the amateur of thought, yet in any vital way they would scarcely affect but the exceptionally few. This applies to Rammon. But the wonderful doctrines of Prince Rhanes were backed by somethin
g equally marvellous, his personality and life. These singularly appealed to Rammon, also born a Prince, and conscious, too, that rank had not hardened his heart as to the mass of mankind, toilers and sufferers, nor in any wise intercepted a just view of the immense spectacle of things.
But, in large, his thought of Buddha partook of that tender awe with which long after Rammon’s time, the earlier unconventional Christians were impressed by the story and character of Christ. It was not possible for him therefore to deem unworthy regard any doctrine however repugnant to his understanding and desire, authentically ascribed to so transcendent a nature. Besides: If Buddha’s estimate of this present life confirms, and more than confirms, Solomon my wise father’s view, so much the more then should a son of his attend to what Buddha reveals or alleges touching an unescapable life indefinitely continuous after death.
Rammon was young; his precocious mind eagerly receptive; in practical matters the honesty of his intellect in part compensated for his lack of experience and acquired knowledge. Nevertheless he had no grounding in axiomatic matters of the first consequence in passing judgement upon those vast claims, sometimes made as from heaven itself, upon the credence of man. Moreover, in connection with Buddha it had never occurred to him as a conjecture, much less as a verity that the more spiritual, wide-seeing, conscientious and sympathetic the nature, so much the more is it spiritually isolated, and isolation is the mother of illusion.
Lost between reverential love for Buddha’s person, and alarm at his confused teaching, (like all transcendent teaching alike unprovable and irrefutable) and with none to befriend and enlighten him, there was no end to the sensitive Prince’s reveries and misgivings.
He was left the more a prey to these disquietudes inasmuch as he took no part in public affairs. And for this reason. Upon the accession of Rehoboam his half-brother, troubles began, ending in the permanent disruption of the kingdom, a calamity directly traceable to the young king’s disdain of the advice of his father’s councillors, and leaning to flatterers of his own age and arrogance of ignorance. The depressing event confirmed Rammon in his natural bias for a life within.