Herman Melville- Complete Poems

by Herman Melville

  Pronounce its name, this natural street’s:

  The Via Crucis—even the way

  Tradition claims to be the one

  Trod on that Friday far away

  By Him our pure exemplar shown.

  ’Tis Whitsun-tide. From paths without,

  Through Stephen’s gate—by many a vein

  Convergent brought within this lane,

  Ere sun-down shut the loiterer out—

  As ’twere a frieze, behold the train!

  Bowed water-carriers; Jews with staves;

  Infirm gray monks; over-loaded slaves;

  Turk soldiers—young, with home-sick eyes;

  A Bey, bereaved through luxuries;

  Strangers and exiles; Moslem dames

  Long-veiled in monumental white,

  Dumb from the mounds, which memory claims;

  A half-starved vagrant Edomite;

  Sore-footed Arab girls, which toil

  Depressed under heap of garden-spoil;

  The patient ass with panniered urn;

  Sour camels humped by heaven and man,

  Whose languid necks through habit turn

  For ease—for ease they hardly gain.

  In varied forms of fate they wend—

  Or man or animal, ’tis one:

  Cross-bearers all, alike they tend

  And follow, slowly follow on.

  But, lagging after, who is he

  Called early every hope to test,

  And now, at close of rarer quest,

  Finds so much more the heavier tree?

  From slopes whence even Echo’s gone,

  Wending, he murmurs in low tone:

  “They wire the world—far under sea

  They talk; but never comes to me

  A message from beneath the stone.”

  Dusked Olivet he leaves behind,

  And, taking now a slender wynd,

  Vanishes in the obscurer town.

  35. EPILOGUE

  If Luther’s day expand to Darwin’s year,

  Shall that exclude the hope—foreclose the fear?

  Unmoved by all the claims our times avow,

  The ancient Sphinx still keeps the porch of shade;

  And comes Despair, whom not her calm may cow,

  And coldly on that adamantine brow

  Scrawls undeterred his bitter pasquinade.

  But Faith (who from the scrawl indignant turns)

  With blood warm oozing from her wounded trust,

  Inscribes even on her shards of broken urns

  The sign o’ the cross—the spirit above the dust!

  Yea, ape and angel, strife and old debate—

  The harps of heaven and dreary gongs of hell;

  Science the feud can only aggravate—

  No umpire she betwixt the chimes and knell:

  The running battle of the star and clod

  Shall run forever—if there be no God.

  Degrees we know, unknown in days before;

  The light is greater, hence the shadow more;

  And tantalized and apprehensive Man

  Appealing—Wherefore ripen us to pain?

  Seems there the spokesman of dumb Nature’s train.

  But through such strange illusions have they passed

  Who in life’s pilgrimage have baffled striven—

  Even death may prove unreal at the last,

  And stoics be astounded into heaven.

  Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned—

  Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind;

  That like the crocus budding through the snow—

  That like a swimmer rising from the deep—

  That like a burning secret which doth go

  Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep;

  Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea,

  And prove that death but routs life into victory.

  JOHN MARR AND

  OTHER SAILORS WITH

  SOME SEA-PIECES

  CONTENTS

  Inscription Epistolary to W. C. R.

  JOHN MARR AND OTHER SAILORS

  John Marr

  Bridegroom Dick

  Tom Deadlight

  Jack Roy

  SEA-PIECES

  The Haglets

  The Æolian Harp At the Surf Inn

  To the Master of the Meteor

  Far Off-Shore

  The Man-of-War Hawk

  The Figure-Head

  The Good Craft Snow-Bird

  Old Counsel Of the young Master Of a wrecked California clipper

  The Tuft of Kelp

  The Maldive Shark

  To Ned

  Crossing the Tropics

  The Berg

  The Enviable Isles

  PEBBLES

  I–VII

  Inscription Epistolary

  to

  W. C. R.

  Health and content.

  Hilary, my companionable acquaintance, during an afternoon stroll under the trees along the higher bluffs of our Riverside Park last June, entertained me with one of those clever little theories, for the originating and formulating whereof he has a singular aptitude. He had but recently generalised it—so at least I inferred—from certain subtler particulars which in the instances of sundry individuals he flattered himself his perspicacity had enabled him to discern.

  Let me communicate to you this theory; not that I imagine you will hail it as a rare intellectual acquisition; hardly that; but because I am much mistaken if it do not attract your personal interest, however little it may otherwise and with other people win consideration or regard.

  Briefly put, it is this. Letting alone less familiar nationalities, an American born in England or an Englishman born in America, each in his natural make-up retains through life, and will some way evince, an intangible something imbibed with his mother’s milk from the soil of his nativity.

  But for a signal illustration hereof whom, think you, he cites? Well, look into any mirror at hand, and you will see the gentleman. Yes, Hilary thinks he perceives in the nautical novels of W. C. R. an occasional flavor as if the honest mid-sea brine, their main constituent, were impregnated with a dash of the New World’s alluvium,—such, say, as is discharged by our Father of Waters into the Gulf of Mexico. “Natural enough,” he observes; “for though a countryman of the Queen—his parentage, home, and allegiance all English—this writer, I am credibly informed, is in his birth-place A New-Worlder; ay, first looked out upon life from a window here of our island of Manhattan, nor very far from the site of my place in Broadway, by Jove!”

  Now Hilary is that rare bird, a man at once genial and acute. Genial, I mean, without sharing much in mere gregariousness, which with some passes for a sort of geniality; and acute, though lacking more or less in cautionary self-skepticism. No wonder then that however pleasing and instructive be Hilary’s companionship, and much as I value the man, yet as touching more than one of his shrewder speculations I have been reluctantly led to distrust a little that penetrative perspicacity of his, a quality immoderately developed in him; and, perhaps (who knows?) developed by his business; for he is an optician, daily having to do with the microscope, telescope, and other inventions for sharpening and extending our natural sight, thus enabling us mortals (as I once heard an eccentric put it) liberally to enlarge the field of our original and essential ignorance.

  In a word, my excellent friend’s private little theory, while, like many a big and bruited one, not without a fancifully plausible aspect commending it to the easy of belief, is yet, in my humble judgment—though I would not hint as much to him for the world—made up i
n no small part of one element inadmissible in sound philosophy, namely, moonshine.

  As to his claim of finding signal evidence for it in the novels aforementioned, that is another matter. That, I am inclined to think is little else than the amiable illusion of a zealous patriot eager to appropriate anything that in any department may tend to reflect added lustre upon his beloved country.

  But, dismissing theory, let me come to a fact, and put it fact-wise; that is to say, a bit bluntly: By the suffrages of seamen and landsmen alike, The Wreck of the Grosvenor entitles the author to the naval crown in current literature. That book led the series of kindred ones by the same hand; it is the flag-ship; and to name it, implies the fleet.

  Upon the Grosvenor’s first appearance—in these waters, I was going to say—all competent judges exclaimed, each after his own fashion, something to this effect: The very spit of the brine in our faces! What writer so thoroughly as this one, knows the sea, and the blue water of it; the sailor and the heart of him; the ship, too, and the sailing and handling of a ship. Besides, to his knowledge he adds invention. And, withal, in his broader humane quality he shares the spirit of Richard H. Dana, a true poet’s son, our own admirable “Man-before-the-Mast.”

  Well, in view of those unanimous verdicts summed up in the foregoing condensed delivery, with what conscientious satisfaction did I but just now in the heading of this Inscription, salute you, W. C. R., by running up your colors at my fore. Would that the craft thus embravened were one of some tonnage, so that the flag might be carried on a loftier spar, commanding an ampler horizon of your recognising friends.

  But the pleasure I take in penning these lines is such, that did a literary Inscription imply aught akin to any bestowment, say, or benefit—which it is so very far indeed from implying—then, sinner though I am, I should be tempted to repeat that divine apothegm, which, were it repeated forever, would never stale—“It is more blessed to give than to receive.” And though by the world at large so unworldly a maxim receives a more hospitable welcome at the ear than in the heart—and no wonder, considering the persistent deceptiveness of so many things mundane—nevertheless, in one province—and I mean no other one than literature, not every individual, I think, at least not every one whose years ought to discharge him from the minor illusions, will dispute it, who has had experience alike in receiving and giving, in one suggestive form or other, sincere contemporary praise. And what, essentially, is such praise? Little else indeed than a less ineloquent form of recognition.

  That these thoughts are no spurious ones, never mind from whomsoever proceeding, one naturally appeals to the author of The Wreck of the Grosvenor, who in his duality as a commended novelist and liberal critic in his more especial department, may rightly be deemed an authority well qualified to determine.

  Thus far as to matters which may be put into type. For personal feeling—the printed page is hardly the place for reiterating that. So I close here as I began, wishing you from my heart the most precious things I know of in this world—Health and Content.

  JOHN MARR AND OTHER SAILORS

  John Marr

  JOHN MARR, toward the close of the last century born in America of a mother unknown, and from boyhood up to maturity a sailor under divers flags, disabled at last from further maritime life by a crippling wound received at close quarters with pirates of the Keys, eventually betakes himself for a livelihood to less active employment ashore. There, too, he transfers his rambling disposition acquired as a seafarer.

  After a variety of removals, at first as a sail-maker from sea-port to seaport, then adventurously inland as a rough bench-carpenter, he, finally, in the last-named capacity, settles down about the year 1838 upon what was then a frontier-prairie sparsely sprinkled with small oak-groves and yet fewer log-houses of a little colony but recently from one of our elder inland States. Here, putting a period to his rovings, he marries.

  Ere long a fever, the bane of new settlements on teeming loam, and whose sallow livery was certain to show itself, after an interval, in the complexions of too many of these people, carries off his young wife and infant child. In one coffin put together by his own hands they are committed with meagre rites to the earth:—another mound, though a small one, in the wide prairie, nor far from where the Mound-Builders of a race only conjecturable had left their pottery and bones, one common clay, under a strange terrace serpentine in form.

  With an honest stillness in his general mien; swarthy, and black-browed; with eyes that could soften or flash, but never harden, yet disclosing at times a melancholy depth, this kinless man had affections which, once placed, not readily could be dislodged, or resigned to a substituted object. Being now arrived at middle life he resolves never to quit the soil that holds the only beings ever connected with him by love in the family-tie. His log-house he lets to a new-comer, one glad enough to get it, and dwells with the household.

  While the acuter sense of his bereavement becomes mollified by time, the void at heart abides. Fain, if possible, would he fill that void by cultivating social relations yet nearer than before, with a people whose lot he purposes sharing to the end—­relations superadded to that mere work-a-day bond arising from participation in the same outward hardships making reciprocal helpfulness a matter of course. But here, and nobody to blame, he is obstructed.

  More familiarly to consort, men of a practical turn must sympathetically converse, and upon topics of real life. But, whether as to persons or events, one can not always be talking about the present; much less, speculating about the future; one must needs recur to the past; which, with the mass of men, where the past is in any personal way a common inheritance, supplies, to most practical natures, the basis of sympathetic communion.

  But the past of John Marr was not the past of these pioneers. Their hands had rested on the plough-tail; his upon the ship’s helm. They knew but their own kind and their own usages; to him had been revealed something of the checkered globe. So limited unavoidably was the mental reach, and by consequence the range of sympathy, in this particular band of domestic emigrants, hereditary tillers of the soil, that the ocean, but a hearsay to their fathers, had now, through yet deeper inland removal, become to themselves little more than a rumor traditional and vague.

  They were a staid people; staid through habituation to monotonous hardship; ascetics by necessity not less than through moral bias; nearly all of them sincerely, however narrowly, religious. They were kindly at need, after their fashion. But to a man wonted—as John Marr in his previous homeless sojournings could not but have been—to the free-and-easy tavern-clubs affording cheap recreation of an evening in certain old and comfortable sea-port towns of that time, and yet more familiar with the companionship afloat of the sailors of the same period, something was lacking. That something was geniality, the flower of life springing from some sense of joy in it, more or less. This their lot could not give to these hard-working endurers of the dispiriting malaria, men to whom a holiday never came; and they had too much of uprightness and no art at all or desire to affect what they did not really feel. At a corn-husking, their least grave of gatherings, did the lone-hearted mariner seek to divert his own thoughts from sadness, and in some degree interest theirs, by adverting to aught removed from the crosses and trials of their personal surroundings, naturally enough he would slide into some marine story or picture; but would soon recoil upon himself, and be silent; finding no encouragement to proceed. Upon one such occasion an elderly man—a blacksmith, and at Sunday gatherings an earnest exhorter, honestly said to him, “Friend, we know nothing of that here.”

  Such unresponsiveness in one’s fellow creatures set apart from factitious life, and by their vocation—in those days little helped by machinery—standing, as it were, next of kin to Nature; this, to John Marr, seemed of a piece with the apathy of Nature herself as envisaged to him here on a prairie where none but the perished Mound-Builders had as yet left a durable mark.

  The
remnant of Indians thereabout—all but exterminated in their recent and final war with regular white troops, a war waged by the Red Men for their native soil and natural rights, had been coerced into the occupancy of wilds not very far beyond the Mississippi;—wilds then, but now the seats of municipalities and states. Prior to that, the bisons, once streaming countless in processional herds, or browsing as in an endless battle-line over these vast aboriginal pastures, had retreated, dwindled in number, before the hunters, in main a race distinct from the agricultural pioneers, though generally their advance-guard. Such a double exodus of man and beast left the plain a desert, green or blossoming indeed, but almost as forsaken as the Siberian Obi. Save the prairie-hen, sometimes startled from its lurking-place in the rank grass; and, in their migratory season, pigeons, high overhead on the wing, in dense multitudes eclipsing the day like a passing storm-cloud; save these—there being no wide woods with their underwood—birds were strangely few.

  Blank stillness would for hours reign unbroken on this prairie. “It is the bed of a dried-up sea” said the companionless sailor—no geologist—to himself, musing at twilight upon the fixed undulations of that immense alluvial expanse bounded only by the horizon, and missing there the stir that, to alert eyes and ears, animates at all times the apparent solitudes of the deep.

  But a scene quite at variance with one’s antecedents may yet prove suggestive of them. Hooped round by a level rim, the prairie was to John Marr a reminder of ocean.

  With some of his former shipmates, chums on certain cruises, he had contrived, prior to this last and more remote removal, to keep up a little correspondence at odd intervals. But from tidings of anybody or any sort, he, in common with the other settlers, was now cut off; quite cut off except from such news as might be conveyed over the grassy billows by the last-arrived prairie-schooner; the vernacular term in those parts and times for the emigrant-wagon arched high over with sail-cloth, and voyaging across the vast champaign. There was no reachable post-office; as yet, not even the rude little receptive box with lid and leathern hinges set up at convenient intervals, on a stout stake along some solitary green way, affording a perch for birds; and which, later in the unintermitting advance of the frontier, would perhaps decay into a mossy monument, attesting yet another successive overleaped limit of civilized life; a life which in America can to-day hardly be said to have any western bound but the ocean that washes Asia. Throughout these plains, now in places over-populous with towns over-opulent; sweeping plains, elsewhere fenced off in every direction into flourishing farms—pale townsmen and hale farmers alike, in part, the descendants of the first sallow settlers; a region that half a century ago produced little for the sustenance of man, but to-day launching its superabundant wheat-harvest on the world; of this prairie, now everywhere intersected with wire and rail, hardly can it be said that at the period here written of there was so much as a traceable road. To the long-distance traveller, the oak groves, wide apart and varying in compass and form; these, with recent settlements, yet more widely separate, offered some landmarks; but otherwise he steered by the sun. In early midsummer, even going but from one log-encampment to the next—a journey, it might be, of hours or good part of a day—travel was much like navigation. In some more enriched depressions between the long green graduated swells, smooth as those of ocean becalmed receiving and subduing to its own tranquility the voluminous surge raised by some far-off hurricane of days previous; here one would catch the first indication of advancing strangers, either in the distance, as a far sail at sea, by the glistening white canvas of the wagon,—the wagon itself wading through the rank vegetation, and hidden by it,—or, failing that, when near to, in the ears of the team, peaking, if not above the tall tiger-lilies, yet above the yet taller grass.