235.32–34 lava glen . . . Tycho’s name have given] Lunar crater named for the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601).
236.8 Time was] That is, 1100–1118, while Baldwin was king of Jerusalem.
236.39–40 smothered text . . . Julian’s pagan mind hath vexed] Isaiah 53:2–4, 12. Julian, the last non-Christian Roman emperor (361–363 C.E.), was called the Apostate because he had renounced Christianity.
237.24 Sybella] Sibylla of Anjou (c. 1112–1165). In the Comte de Montalembert’s Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, Melville learned how Sybella, Countess of Flanders, sister of Baldwin III, devoted her life to nursing lepers.
241.17 Naomi ere her trial] Before the death of Naomi’s husband and her two sons (Ruth 1:1–3).
243.25–26 thy line, Theocritus . . . Dark Joel’s text] Theocritus, the third century B.C.E. writer, was known for bucolics, in contrast to verses such as Joel 1:15: “Alas for the day! for the day of the Lord is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come.”
245.17 descend unto Siloam.] At the pool of Siloam, the Fountain of the canto title, Jesus healed a blind man (John 1:1–11).
245.29 Science explains it.] In Biblical Researches in Palestine (1841) the geographer Edward Robinson tells how he crawled hundreds of feet underground to show that the pool of Siloam and the Fountain of the Virgin were connected, thereby explaining the mysterious “irregular flow” of Siloam.
245.32–34 angel in Bethesda’s pool . . . made whole?] Another site of a miracle by a pool. In John 5:1–4 many “impotent” (handicapped) people wait by the pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem for an angel to trouble the water; then the first to enter the pool is healed. Jesus heals a man who had suffered for thirty-eight years and never got to the pool fast enough.
245.35 Or, by an equal dream] Vine puts a miracle at Bethesda on a level with legends of the Egyptian god Ammon’s oasis in the Lybian desert.
247.5–8 If use he served not . . . Mammon’s mine?] Paraphrase: If so far Vine had not achieved anything, perhaps he had been awaiting a worthy incentive; better for one like the god Apollo to serve for a time as a humble shepherd (to Admetus, the King of Pherae, in Thessaly) than do mundane work for pay. For the full significance of this story to Melville, see “In the Turret” and “In the Hall of Marbles.”
247.15 Cecilia] Roman Christian martyred in third century C.E., regarded as the patroness of music.
247.40 an Ariel] A trick-playing sprite like the fairy who executes Prospero’s orders in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
248.5–7 gleamed the richer . . . Golden Bough.] In a dark “ancient wood” (Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid) two doves conduct Aeneas to a tree that bears the Sibyl’s gleaming golden bough, his passport to the underworld where he will see his father. Darkly clad, Vine similarly gleams out from his obscure setting.
249.3 Dathan swallowed . . . mine] Dathan and his brother Abiram, trouble-making rebels among the Israelites Moses led out of Egypt, are punished in Numbers 16:31: “And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up.”
249.16 the kiss.] Matthew 26:49.
250.6 James and Peter fell asleep] In Matthew 26:40, James and Peter fall asleep while Jesus is praying at Gethsemane.
250.30 a quiet sign] Vine imitates Jesus at Gethsemane (Matthew 26:45).
251.7 Paul Pry] From the title character of the 1826 London farce by John Poole, a busy, meddling, intrusive person, nosy to the point of madness.
252.7 Baalbec] Ancient city (located in present-day Lebanon). Its extensive ruins include temples of Jupiter, Bacchus, and Venus, and a mosque.
253.3–4 Christ’s belfry . . . Moslem minaret!] Melville underlined part of this passage in his copy of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine (1857): “Close beside the Christian belfry towers, the minaret of Omar” tells “its well-known story of Arabian devotion and magnanimity.” Omar’s praying inside the Norman church would have made it Islamic from then on. Because of Omar’s restraint, both the church and the minaret guard the Dome of the Rock.
254.9 Queen Helena] Helena, mother of the Emperor of Rome Constantine, built the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, on the site of Christ’s Crucifixion and burial.
254.15 timing well the tide] Rolfe is skeptical of Helena’s son’s timing in making the Roman Empire Christian.
254.23 De Maintenon] Madame de Maintenon (1635–1719), second wife of Louis XIV of France.
254.38 Last time ’twas burnt] In 1808.
255.23 Lima’s first convulsion] In 1746.
256.21 Tyrrhene seas] The Mediterranean off southern Italy (Melville found “Tyrrhene” in Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid).
256.31–32 “Phylæ . . . broken tomb] Modern Philae, now an island in the reservoir of the Aswan Low Dam, once revered as a burying place of the god Osiris.
256.33–257.7 A god . . . my son.] Murdered by his brother Set (not the Python), Osiris is restored to life and conceives Horus, who subsequently restores order. Rolfe fuses Egyptian, Greek, and Christian religions. Melville had an engraving of J.M.W. Turner’s 1860 painting Apollo Killing the Python, depicting Apollo’s slaying of the great snake that had survived the flood in the time of Deucalion (the Greek Noah).
257.10–13 Matthew . . . Hosea?] Matthew 2:13–15 and Hosea 11:1.
257.16 Cicero,”] Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.), Roman consul and great Latin stylist.
259.1 OF RAMA] Rama, the Hindu deity whose story is told in the Indian epic poem Ramayana (c. 300 B.C.E.), composed in Sanskrit.
263.11–13 “How solitary . . . How still!”] Cf. Lamentations 1:1.
263.29 is Niebuhrized.] Modified, updated. Barthold Niebuhr (1776–1831) in Roman History (1827–1828) took the tone of a myth-buster, as in his gleeful sifting of evidence for the Trojan settlement of Rome.
263.36–264.1 Diana’s moon . . . pale Endymion.] Allusion to Martin Farquhar Tupper’s poem “The Moon” (1848), in which Keats’s Endymion is trivialized.
264.31–32 the taint . . . Solomon’s complaint.] See Ecclesiastes 10:1: “Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour.”
265.14 ARCULF AND ADAMNAN] Arculf, early French pilgrim to the Holy Land, was shipwrecked in the Hebrides where in St. Columba’s monastery on Iona island he enthralls the abbot Adamnan and worshipful Scots with miracles he had witnessed in Jerusalem.
265.24 Hakeem’s deed] The tenth-century caliph destroyed Helena’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
266.3 Saint Columba’s pile] From Ireland, Columba (543?–597) brought Christianity to Iona, in Scotland.
268.6 Pictish storm-king] The ancient Picts inhabited eastern and northern Scotland during the late Iron Age and early Middle Ages; the name refers to their custom of body painting or tattooing.
268.27 But he, the wanderer] Nehemiah.
269.17 son of Kish.”] Saul. See 1 Samuel 9:2: “And he had a son, whose name was Saul, a choice young man, and a goodly.”
270.25–273.4 “I recall . . . calamity but just.] Rolfe tells a version of the sinking of the Essex by a whale in 1820 and the survival of Captain George Pollard after a 2,000-mile voyage to South America, an experience that reversed his adherence to the idea of free will.
272.2 crime abhorred] Cannibalism.
273.5 Silvio Pellico] Italian writer and patriot (1789–1854), imprisoned a decade by the Austrian rulers, subject of Melville’s “Pausilippo (in the Time of Bomba).”
273.15 Laocoon’s serpent] Classical statue excavated in 1506 and put in the Vatican depicts the Trojan Laocoön and his sons in their death throes against snakes.
274.6–8 this single one . . . Psalmist’s making moan] “I watch, and am as a sparro
w alone upon the house top” (Psalms 102:7); however, the topic in Psalms 102 is not the loss of a mate.
277.25 Job’s text] Job 19:25.
278.15–17 The blameless simulator . . . Burckhardt.] Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784–1817), Swiss explorer, who mastered Near East languages and for years passed as a Muslim. He was the first European to see Petra, later described in John Lloyd Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petræa, and the Holy Land (1837). “Blameless,” he sought to understand the mores of the people he lived among and safeguarded fragile oriental documents.
280.3 Nil admirari] Let nothing astonish you.
281.5 Cristina of Coll’alto] In English poet Samuel Rogers’s Italy (1823), “Coll’alto,” the serving girl Christina, the mysterious “White Lady,” is “walled up within the Castle-wall.”
281.19 Vitriolists] Extreme partisans. The word may be a coinage by Melville.
281.31–282.12 volumes . . . St. Mary’s Hall.”] The first book left behind by the presumably fictitious B. L. of Oxford’s Magdalen College expounds Anglican theology, while the second is a quick survey of revolutionary ideas of the last century. In his Das Leben Jésu, David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) dismissed miracles as myths: a real Jesus had lived but was not divine. Ernest Renan (1823–1892) in his La vie de Jésus (1863) also denied the miracles in the course of erasing Jesus as Jew. From a phase of honoring the rough nature god, Pan, the book proceeds to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), anarchist author of the 1840 What is Property? (Answer: Property is Theft.)
283.1 John’s wilderness] Where John the Baptist preached (Matthew 3:1–3).
286.16 Candlemas] February 2, the day commemorating the purification of Mary and the presentation of Jesus at the Temple.
Part Two: The Wilderness
290.5 the Templar old] The Knights Templars, twelfth-century Catholic military order charged with protecting pilgrims to the Holy Land; immensely wealthy and political.
290.16 Jonathan] A Yankee.
290.35 Talus] Mythical giant bronze automaton of Crete.
292.14–16 Paul’s plea . . . from Athens . . . the Thessalonians] The two epistles to the Thessalonians (the second of which was more certainly written from Athens), urging them to exhibit faith, love, and hope.
292.30 Capuan zest] Self-indulgent, referring to Capua, Italy, proverbial for its luxury.
295.3 Palmer’s Beach] At the Jordan River.
295.24–28 sighing of Ravenna’s wood . . . to solitude.] In this “deep moral fantasy” from Boccaccio’s Decameron a woman is gleeful when the young Guido kills himself out of love for her. She dies and each Friday Guido pursues her through Ravenna’s wood, disembowels her, and feeds her heart to dogs. A living noble, Nastagio, witnesses the ritual and uses it to scare his beloved into marrying him.
296.13–14 wishing-cap . . . Fortunatus.”] In White-Jacket (ch. 41) Melville praises Thomas Dekker’s Old Fortunatus (1599), a retelling of a German folktale, as a “glorious” old drama. In it Fortune offers a poor old man a choice of gifts from which he chooses riches.
296.25 “Pink, pink . . . pink’s the hue] Behind this badinage is Jaques’s “Motley’s the only wear” in As You Like It (II.vii.34).
297.10–12 near gate . . . martyrdom] Near the site of Stephen’s martyrdom (Acts 7:55–60).
299.26 brass . . . cymbal!] Cf. 1 Corinthians 13:1.
301.31 snaffle him with kings] In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) championed the divine right of kings.
302.5 new world’s chanticleer] In chapter 1 of Walden (1854), Thoreau writes: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” The first edition of Walden carried these words as the title-page epigraph.
302.30 This Psalmanazer] In the first decade of the 1700s the brilliant French (?) imposter and pseudo-lexicographer “George Psalmanazar” (c. 1679–1763) charmed London as a Formosan abducted by Jesuits; for decades he was intimate with notable people such as Samuel Johnson.
302.33 Peace and good will] Cf. Luke 2:14.
304.22 kings in Forty-eight] The Year of Revolution, 1848, saw a wave of republican revolts against European monarchies. Melville wrote the revolutions in Europe into Mardi and the next year, in 1849, briefly saw Paris for himself.
305.27 “Fair Circe . . . the sty!”] Circe, enchantress or sorceress in Greek mythology. In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe turns Odysseus’s men into swine.
309.4 came Jesus from Jerusalem] To the house of Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha in Bethany, two miles from the city (Luke 10:38–42 and John 11).
309.36 Ibrahim’s time] Ibrahim Pasha (1789–1848), viceroy of Egypt and head of the Egyptian military and civil administration of Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon, who delivered several defeats to the Ottoman army.
311.4–5 Palmyrene . . . Tadmore’s tented scene] In Melville’s time, Palmyra (also called Tadmore), once a great city, was an oasis northeast of Damascus.
311.8 yataghan] Short Ottoman knife with a double-curved blade and no guard.
312.24 Prolific sire.] Solomon had “seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines” (1 Kings 11:4), number of children unspecified.
314.7 Acheron] One of the rivers of the Greek underworld.
316.5 Levite . . . priest.”] Demanded to define “neighbor,” Jesus tells of a priest and a Levite who looked away from a naked half-dead victim of thieves (Luke 10:31–32). Thus ignored by his countrymen, a Samaritan rescues him and cares for him (verses 33–35), thereby demonstrating what it is to be a neighbor.
319.37 Paul’s courtesy] At the end of an epistle Paul would wish peace and grace.
320.36–39 Paul . . . name and shrine?] Acts 28:11 does not specify that Paul ripped away evidence the ship had been named for patrons of sailors, twin sons of Zeus (Castor and Pollux).
321.36 stone after stone] The message of John the Baptist (John 1:23), taken literally.
322.8 “All things are possible] Jesus’s words (Matthew 19:26).
323.28–29 Darwin quotes . . . Shelley] In The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), chapter 8, thinking how long a plain (in Patagonia) had remained as it was, Darwin quotes Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (“all seems eternal now”).
325.10 Erebus] Darkness in the underworld on the way to Hades.
326.10 cigarette, a summer friend] Because it goes out faster than a cigar if not sucked on; Thomas Paine in The Crisis (1776) dismisses the “summer soldier” and “sunshine patriot.”
327.3 Abel’s hound] In Genesis Abel has no dog.
327.14 forth from Seir] In 2 Chronicles 2:15, the battle against the people of Seir was not Jehoshaphat’s to fight “but God’s.”
328.1 St. Louis!] King Louis IX of France, who died of disease on the eighth Crusade in Carthage (present-day Tunisia).
328.20 Hecla] Active volcano in Iceland; Melville jokes about its coolness in Moby-Dick, chapter 3.
329.36 Giaour] A non-Muslim—an infidel.
331.24 doomed Pentapolis] The Torah names Admah, Zeboim, and Bela as doomed cities along with Sodom and Gomorrah but Genesis 19:24–25 does not name Bela.
332.8–23 read the Book . . . Yea, verily.”] Achon’s sins and the cost of disobedience to God are told in Joshua 7. When Joshua sent 3,000 men against Ai not knowing that Achan, Carmi’s wicked son, had stolen treasures in Jericho, thirty-six of his men were killed. Joshua ordered Achan and his family and animals stoned and burned in the valley of Achor (trouble), then slaughtered 12,000 men and women of Ai.
333.36–37 Balboa’s ken . . . from Darien] Melville is mindful of Keats’s sonnet on reading Chapman’s Homer, where
Cortez stares at the Pacific from Darien.
336.7–9 reed . . . In wilderness?] See Luke 7:24, the ironical first challenge of Jesus’s powerful tribute to John the Baptist: “What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A reed shaken with the wind?”
336.17–18 Me too . . . snubbed kin;”] In John 13:4–17 Jesus demonstrates that the master is not greater than the servant.
338.14–15 hair-clad John . . . Volney!”] John the Baptist, who wore camel’s hair cloth (Matthew 3:4, Mark 1:6); the French philosopher Chasseboeuf de Volney (1757–1820), who believed all religions could be reconciled, published Travels through Egypt and Syria in 1787.
338.19 Chateaubriand] The Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), a Catholic Royalist, visited the Mediterranean in 1806–1807, then wrote The Martyrs (1809), about the Roman persecution of early Christians at the end of the third century.
338.23 Red Caps] French Revolutionists who wore the Phrygian (or Liberty) cap.
338.25 Septemberists] Those who massacred thousands of prisoners and Royalists in Paris and other cities, September 2–7, 1792.
338.26 Vitriolists] See note 281.19.
338.28–29 Lamartine . . . latter palmer.] Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) published his belatedly translated A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1848, the year he became a founder of the French Second Republic only to prove too moderate and retire.
339.13–15 Knight of the Leopard . . . Diamond of the Desert?”] In Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman (1825) Sir Kenneth’s battered shield depicts a “couchant leopard”; in his wanderings he is refreshed at a fountain, the “diamond in the desert.”
339.20–26 Tasso’s Armida . . . fancy’s bid] In Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated Armida is a sorceress who retards the Crusader Rinaldo.
339.27–28 Rahab . . . Jericho.”] Harlot spared at the destruction of Jericho because she had hidden Joshua’s spies.
Herman Melville- Complete Poems Page 93