Not magnitude, nor lavishness,
But Form—the Site;
Not innovating wilfulness,
But reverence for the Archetype.
Exactly when Melville started writing verse is unknown, but by the spring of 1860 he had accumulated enough poems to fill a small manuscript; and while in New York waiting to board the Meteor, he asked his brother Allan to place it with a publisher. Here is the companion piece to “Greek Architecture,” entitled “Greek Masonry”:
Joints were none that mortar sealed:
Together, scarce with line revealed,
The blocks in symmetry congealed.
The proposed book never reached print. A few of its contents survive because they were among several poems Melville gathered many years later under the rubric “Fruit of Travel Long Ago” in a privately printed volume, Timoleon, etc., that appeared in an edition of twenty-five copies just before his death. Reading these poems is like overhearing a musician who no longer expects to play public recitals but who still practices in private in order to keep his fingers limber. “If we are completely to understand Melville’s poetry,” as Robert Penn Warren has written, “we must see it against the backdrop of his defeat as a writer.”
2.
Warren used the word “writer” to mean prose writer, because he knew that for Melville the turn to poetry amounted to an attempt to start his life anew amid a sense of failure. Years later, while working on his long narrative poem about a pilgrim to the Holy Land, Clarel, he still wanted the full extent of his conversion from prose to verse kept secret. “Pray do not mention to any one,” Lizzie wrote her stepmother in 1875, that Herman “is writing poetry—you know how such things spread and he would be very angry if he knew I had spoken of it—and of course I have not, except in confidence to you and the family.”
His first sustained poetic theme was the Civil War. On April 13, 1861, a few days after Judge Shaw’s funeral,* he was probably in the crowd in Pittsfield that gathered at the town bulletin board (“ ‘No seeing here,’ ” cries one—‘don’t crowd’— / You tall man, pray you, read aloud”), straining to see the posted telegraph dispatches reporting the night attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. In a poem (“Bridegroom Dick”) composed years later, Melville tried to capture the shock of that day in nautical metaphors:
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 cashed fleet o’ States in Secession’s foul weather.
“How to speak” about the war was a question he never satisfactorily answered. “Obscure as the wood, the entangled rhyme / But hints at the maze of war,” he wrote in his poem about the ferocious battles that took place over many months in the Virginia backwoods known as “the Wilderness.” In 1866, after the war had ended, he published five poems in Harper’s that, lightly revised, became part of a book entitled Battle-Pieces and Other Aspects of the War, to which he appended a prose “supplement” calling for reconciliation between North and South. He arranged the book as a roughly chronological narrative, from the hanging of John Brown through the assassination of President Lincoln and the postwar testimony of Robert E. Lee before Congress. Yet one reads these poems without getting much sense of the cocky indignation with which the North greeted the war or the shock that shortly followed when Union troops were routed at Bull Run and, “baffled, humiliated, panic-struck” (Whitman’s words), fled back to Washington amid talk of the government surrendering the city. Nor do they convey the grinding horror of the months and years that ensued. He had always written best about things of which he had close knowledge, but Battle-Pieces was a secondhand “chronicle,” as Edmund Wilson once put it, “of the patriotic feelings of an anxious middle-aged non-combatant as, day by day, he reads the bulletins from the front.”
This war, like so many before and since, outstripped the worst anticipations of how much death it would bring. By the time Melville began writing in the spring of 1865 (“with few exceptions,” he explained in a prefatory note to his Civil War book, “the Pieces in this volume originated in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond”), more than half a million men and boys had died in what remains today by far the deadliest conflict in American history. Melville read about the carnage in black-bordered newspaper articles and “saw” it in photographs; but his closest contact with the war itself came in April 1864, when he visited his cousin Henry Gansevoort, who held the rank of lieutenant colonel, at the Virginia front, where, according to Lizzie, he “saw various battlefields and called on Gen. Grant.”
The best poems in Battle-Pieces were about things that Melville did witness. In August 1863, he saw survivors of the Forty-ninth Massachusetts Volunteers parading in Pittsfield with the twice-wounded Colonel William Francis Bartlett on horseback at their head. In “The College Colonel,” Bartlett leads the procession with “Indian aloofness” and the aspect of a weary mariner:
He brings his regiment home—
Not as they filed two years before,
But a remnant half-tattered, and battered, and worn,
Like castaway sailors, who—stunned
By the surf’s loud roar,
Their mates dragged back and seen no more—
Again and again breast the surge,
And at last crawl, spent, to shore.
At the time of the Mexican War, Melville had written to Gansevoort that the day was not far off “when we will be able to talk of our killed & wounded like some of the old Eastern conquerors reckoning them up by thousands,” and in Moby-Dick he had favorably compared the “disordered … decks of a whaleship” slippery with whale guts to “the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink all ladies’ plaudits.” The Civil War made maimed veterans a common sight in many cities and towns, and seeing them in Pittsfield, Melville thought back to the early days before the dying had begun:
How should they dream that Death in a rosy clime
Would come to thin their shining throng?
Youth feels immortal, like the gods sublime.
He retrospectively imagined (he had had no window in the town) the sight of boys strutting toward the killing fields:
One noonday, at my window in the town,
I saw a sight—saddest that eyes can see—
Young soldiers marching lustily
Unto the wars,
With fifes, and flags in mottoed pageantry;
While all the porches, walks, and doors
Were rich with ladies cheering royally.
There is a sad inevitability in these friezelike images of boys marching toward death; yet the poem, like all of Battle-Pieces, has a certain hampered carefulness. It feels constructed, with none of the adventurous freedom of Melville’s stories and novels, in which, as Robert Penn Warren puts it, he absorbed “thousands of vivid images and rhythms … into the texture of the prose.” In his prose, even when the glut of imagery impedes the narrative flow, the excess gives the writing a singular richness and density; but in his poems, the images (“rosy clime,” “starry heights,” “gladsome air”) tend to be formal and inert, as if they have been dusted off after long storage in some Depository of Poetical Tropes.
But if Battle-Pieces looked to the past for its diction and forms, its themes belonged to the future. It was full of allusions to iron and fire and the new machinery by which the art of killing was being advanced. “War shall yet be, but warriors / Are now but operatives,” he wrote of the clash of ironclad warships that took place in March 1862. In The Confidence-Man, he had enumerated an industrial inventory worthy of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (“carding machines, horse-shoe machines, tunnel-boring machines, reaping machines, apple-paring machines, boot-blacking machines, sewing machines, shaving machines, run-of-errand machines, dumb-waiter machines, and the Lord-only-know-what machines”), to which it was now necessary to add the ars
enal of military inventions, from armored ships to repeating rifles, that made the Civil War the first large-scale demonstration of mechanized warfare—a rehearsal, as it turned out, for World War I.
Though Melville was fully a Union man and dedicated Battle-Pieces “to the memory of the three hundred thousand who in the war for the maintenance of the Union fell devotedly under the flag of their fathers,” he sympathized with the enemy who resisted the mechanic power (“Perish their Cause! But mark the men—”) and whose loneliness in defeat he evokes in these lines about a rebel soldier released after the war into the festive streets of New York:
He hears the drum; he sees our boys
From his wasted fields return;
Ladies feast them on strawberries,
And even to kiss them yearn.
It is typical of Melville’s poetry that he wrenches the syntax in order to complete the rhyme, acknowledging at the same time that “rhyme’s barbaric cymbal” clashes with his theme.
Battle-Pieces, like Pierre, was a book about the futility of heroic gestures in the face of massive force. Where Whitman saw the people “bearing the brunt of the labor of death … of their own choice, fighting, dying for their own idea,” Melville saw a people led to slaughter by a fate over which they had no control. In “The Conflict of Convictions,” he expressed his fear that the nation was losing its democratic ideals in the very struggle to save them:
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.
One reason that Battle-Pieces did not sell well is that it sounded a dissonant note at a time of high nationalist feeling. The South was fighting for independence as a slaveholding republic. Many people in the North, though Lincoln did not articulate this aim till late in the war, wanted a Union purged of slavery. Toward the end of that bloodbath year of 1863, Emerson declared, “We are coming—thanks to the war,—to a nationality,” and even the usually wary Hawthorne had become a flag-waver: “Strange to say,” he wrote in 1861, this war “has had a benevolent effect upon my spirits … it was delightful to share in the heroic sentiment of the time, and to feel that I had a country—a consciousness which seemed to make me young again.” (Hawthorne acknowledged that he could revel in this sentiment only because “I am too old to shoulder a musket and … Julian is too young.”) But Melville demurred. He modulated the patriotic emotion of Battle-Pieces with his sense of war as wasting tragedy. Perhaps his most representative poem was “The Apparition,” prompted by the news, in July 1864, that Union troops had dug a tunnel in which they set off a huge explosion under the Confederate entrenchments at Petersburg. Evil, disguised in pastoral green costume, spreads its poison at the moment of release:
Convulsions came; and when the field
Long slept in pastoral green
A goblin-mountain was upheaved
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But ere the eye could take it in,
or mind could comprehension win,
It sunk!—and at our feet.
So, then, Solidity’s a crust—
The core of fire below;
All may go well for many a year,
But who can think without a fear
Of horrors that happen so?
The rhyme is forced (“take it in … comprehension win”), and the theme cheapened by the didacticism of the last two lines. And “at our feet” is a false note, as Melville was not there to hear the screams and see the body parts fly.
In “Gettysburg,” he resorted again to maritime metaphors in an effort to describe a place and event he had not seen:
Before our lines it seemed a beach
Which wild September gales have strown
With havoc on wreck, and dashed therewith
Pale crews unknown—
And in “The House-Top,” he imagined himself (he was in Pittsfield) on a roof during the New York City draft riots of July 1863, as white mobs, enraged at the new conscription laws, hunted down blacks and hanged them from lampposts. Having seen none of this with his own eyes, he depended on newspaper accounts, which he filtered through his memory of Aeneas standing on a roof in Troy as the Greeks advance upon the city with (in Dryden’s rendering of Virgil’s Latin) “frightful Sounds” as if “a Flood of Fire by Wind is born, / Crackling it rowls, and mows the standing Corn.” Here, in his mind’s eye, Melville looks down over the New York mob:
Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads
Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by.
Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf
Of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Town is taken by its rats—ship-rats
And rats of the wharves. All civil charms
And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe—
Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway
Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve,
And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature.
Melville wrote only one poem, “Formerly a Slave,” that touched directly on what Lincoln called “the cause of the war,” and this poem was provoked not by an encounter with an actual person but by an oil portrait of a freed slavewoman that he had seen on exhibit in a New York gallery.
Reviewing Battle-Pieces for The Atlantic in 1867, the young William Dean Howells asked the right questions:
Is it possible—you ask yourself, after running over all these celebrative, inscriptive, and memorial verses—that there has really been a great war, with battles fought by men and bewailed by women? Or is it only that Mr. Melville’s inner consciousness has been perturbed, and filled with the phantasms of enlistments, marches, fights in the air, parenthetic bulletin-boards, and tortured humanity shedding, not words and blood, but words alone?
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Having passed forty before the war began, Melville faced no requirement or expectation that he enlist. Like most Americans of means (the draft riots were, in part, a poor man’s protest against the policy that allowed rich men to purchase “substitutes” to fight in their place), he and his family were spared the worst. But if he spent the war in distant safety, every mail delivery made him fearful of receiving bad news about his brother Tom or his cousins Henry and Guert, who were serving in the Union forces. All survived, though Guert, suspected of drunkenness, was court-martialed for running his ship aground and damaging it so badly that it had to be scuttled. Among friends and family outside the fighting ranks, death was busy. Judge Shaw had died just before the shooting began. By the end of 1863, George Duyckinck and Sarah Morewood were gone, both at age thirty-nine. In May 1864, Melville received news that Hawthorne had died while traveling in New Hampshire to take the mountain air in an attempt to revive his failing health. Herman “was much attached to him,” Maria wrote to Uncle Peter, “& will mourn his loss.” Lizzie confirmed that he was very “much shocked.”
Early in 1863, the Melvilles had reached a decision they had been coming to in stages: to close up their country life and return to the city. After having spent the winter of 1862 in New York, they had returned to Arrowhead. But, finding the farm harder than ever to maintain, they moved in October 1862 into a rented house on South Street in the town of Pittsfield. On one of the trips back to the farm in November to collect belongings in what was a prolonged and piecemeal move, Melville’s horse bucked in panic when the carriage hit a bump and the ironwork ripped away from the wooden frame. Melville, thrown into a ditch, sustained painful if not serious injuries—a bruised or broken shoulder and a shock to the ribs, which remained tender for months. The brush with death was close enough that it left him, more than a month later, with mortality still on his mind. “This recovery,” he wrote to his brother-in-law Sam Shaw,
is flattering to my vanity. I begin to indulge in the plea
sing idea that my life must needs be of some value. Probably I consume a certain amount of oxygen, which unconsumed might create some subtle disturbance in Nature.… I once, like other spoonies, cherished a loose sort of notion that I did not care to live very long. But I will frankly own that I have now no serious, no insuperable objections to a respectable longevity. I don’t like the idea of being left out night after night in a cold churchyard.—In warm and genial countries, death is much less of a bugbear than in our frozen latitudes. A native of Hindostan takes easily and kindly to his latter end. It is but a stepping round the corner to him. He knows he will sleep warm.
Even in this self-denigrating little note, Melville was mocking the kind of cosmic egotism that his Romantic contemporaries were wont to express. Here, for example, is Poe, writing in 1848: “If I venture to displace, by even the billionth part of an inch, the microscopical speck of dust which lies now upon the point of my finger … I have done a deed which shakes the Moon in her path, which causes the Sun to be no longer the Sun, and which alters forever the destiny of the multitudinous myriads of stars that roll and glow in the majestic presence of their Creator.” In his youth, Melville’s voice had sometimes risen into that high register, as when, in White-Jacket, he declared that “I have a voice that helps to shape eternity; and my volitions stir the orbits of the furthest suns.” But the author of the letter to Sam is a writer who jokes at his own expense when asserting that if he were to stop breathing, “Nature” would be disturbed. Nature, he knew, would not care a bit about his extinction. This is the same self-satirizing writer who had written of pantheism as delusion in “The Mast-Head” chapter of Moby-Dick, and who expressed impatience at Emerson’s “insinuation, that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.” One reason for Melville’s dissonance in his own time is that he felt so acutely the fact of human insignificance—a fact of which he was apparently reminded by being tossed unceremoniously into the ditch.
Melville: His World and Work Page 37