Herman Melville- Complete Poems

by Herman Melville

  Enough. Alike with the unfinished house, and its tenants new to the complexities of the lock wedlock, things took their natural course. As to the house, never being treated to a protective coat of paint, since Rip’s exchequer was always at low ebb, it soon contracted, signally upon its northern side, a gray weather-stain, supplying one topic for Dame Van Winkle’s domestic reproaches; for these in end came, though, in the present instance, they did not wholly originate in any hard utilitarian view of matters.

  Women, more than men, disrelishing the idea of old age, are sensitive, even the humblest of them, to aught in any way unpleasantly suggestive of it. And the gray weather-stain not only gave the house the aspect of age, but worse; for in association with palpable evidences of its recentness as an erection, it imparted a look forlornly human, even the look of one grown old before his time. The roof quite as much as the clapboards contributed to make notable in it the absence of that spirit of youth which the sex, however hard the individual lot, inheriting more of the instinct of Paradise than ourselves, would fain recognise in everything. The shingles there, with the supports for the shingler—which temporary affairs had through Rip’s remissness been permanently left standing—these it took but a few autumns to veneer with thin mosses, especially in that portion where the betrayed purpose expressed by the uncompleted abode had been lamented over by a huge willow—the object now missing—a willow of the weeping variety, under whose shade the house had originally been built. Broken bits of rotted twigs and a litter of discolored leaves were the tears continually wept by this ancient Jeremiah upon the ever-greening roof of the house fatally arrested in course of completion.

  No wonder that so untidy an old inhabitant had always been the object of Dame Van Winkle’s dislike. And when Rip, no longer the bridegroom, in obedience to her imperative command, attacking it with an axe none of the sharpest, and finding the needful energetic blows sorely jarring to the natural quiescence of his brain-pan, ignominiously gave it up, the indignant dame herself assaulted it. But the wenned trunk was of inordinate diameter, and, under the wens, of an obtuse soft toughness all but invincible to the dulled axe. In brief the venerable tree long remained a monument of the negative victory of stubborn inertia over spasmodic activity and an ineffectual implement.

  But the scythe that advances forever and never needs whetting, sweeping that way at last, brought the veteran to the sod. Yes, during Rip’s sylvan slumbers the knobby old inhabitant had been gathered to his fathers. Falling prone, and luckily away from the house, in time it made its own lowly monument; an ever-crumbling one, to be sure, yet, all the more for that, tenderly dressed by the Spring: an umber-hued mound of mellow punk, mossed in spots, with wild violets springing from it here and there, attesting the place of the departed, even the same place where it fell. But, behold: shooting up above the low dilapidated eaves, the Lilac now laughed where the inconsolable willow had wept. Lightly it dropt upon the green roof the pink little bells from its bunched blossoms in place of the old willow’s yellowed leaves. Seen from the wood, as Rip in his reappearance viewed it, in part it furnished a gay screen to the late abode, now a tenantless ruin, hog-backed at last by the settling of the ridge-pole in the middle, abandoned to leisurely decay, and to crown its lack of respectability, having a scandalous name as the nightly rendezvous of certain disreputable ghosts, including that of poor Rip himself. Nevertheless, for all this sad decay and disrepute, there must needs have been something of redeeming attractiveness in these deserted premises, as the following incident may show, the interest whereof may perchance serve to justify its insertion even at this critical point.

  In the month of blossoms long after Rip’s disappearance in the mountain forests, followed in time by the yet more mysterious evanishment of his dame under the sod of the lowlands, a certain meditative vagabondo, to wit, a young artist, in his summer wanderings after the Picturesque, was so taken by the pink Lilac relieved against the greenly ruinous house, that camping under his big umbrella before these admirable objects one fine afternoon he opened his box of colors, brushes, and so forth, and proceeded to make a study.

  While thus quietly employed he arrested the attention of a gaunt hatchet-faced stony-eyed individual with a gray sort of salted complexion like that of dried codfish, jogging by on a lank white horse. The stranger alighted, and after satisfying his curiosity as to what the artist was about, expressed his surprise that such an object as a miserable old ruin should be thought worth painting. “Why,” said he, “if you must idle it this way—can find nothing useful to do, paint something respectable, or, better, something godly; paint our new tabernacle—there it is,” pointing right ahead to a rectangular edifice stark on a bare hill-side, with an aspiring wooden steeple whereon the distant blue peaks of the Kattskills placidly looked down, peradventure mildly wondering whether any rivalry with them was intended. “Yes, paint that now,” he continued; “just the time for it; it got its last coat only the other day. A’int it white though!”

  A cadaver! shuddered the artist to himself, glancing at it and instantly averting his eyes. More vividly than ever he felt the difference between dead planks or dead iron smeared over with white-lead; the difference between these and white marble, when new from the quarry sparkling with the minute mica in it, or, mellowed by ages, taking on another and more genial tone endearing it to that Pantheistic antiquity, the sense whereof is felt or latent in every one of us. In visionary flash he saw in their prime the perfect temples of Attica flushed with Apollo’s rays on the hill-tops, or on the plain at eve disclosed in glimpses through the sacred groves around them. For the moment, in this paganish dream he quite lost himself.

  “Why do’nt you speak?” irritably demanded the other; “wo’nt you paint it?”

  “It is sufficiently painted already, heaven knows,” said the artist coming to himself with a discharging sigh, and now resignedly setting himself again to his work.

  “You will stick to this wretched old ruin then, will you”?

  “Yes, and the Lilac.”

  “The Lilac? and black what-do-ye-call-it—lichen, on the trunk, so old is it. It is half rotten, and its flowers spring from the rottenness under it, just as the moss on those eaves does from the rotting shingles.”

  “Yes, decay is often a gardener” assented the other.

  “What’s that gibberish? I tell you this beggarly ruin is no more a fit object for a picture than the disreputable vagabond who once lived in it.”

  “Ah!” now first pricking his ears; “who was he? Tell me.”

  And straightway the hatchet-faced individual rehearsed, and in a sort of covertly admonitory tone, Rip’s unheroic story up to the time of his mysterious disappearance. This, by the way, he imputed to a Providential visitation overtaking a lazy reprobate whose chief occupation had been to loaf up and down the country with a gun and game-bag, much like some others with a big umbrella and a box.

  “Thank you, friend,” said the sedate one, never removing his eyes from his work, “Thank you; but what should we poor devils of Bohemians do for the Picturesque, if Nature was in all things a precisian, each building like that church, and every man made in your image.—But, bless me, what am I doing, I must tone down the green here.”

  “Providence will take you in hand one of these days, young man” in high dudgeon exclaimed the other; “Yes, it will give you a toning down, as you call it. Made in my image! You wrest Holy Writ. I shake the dust off my feet and leave you for profane.”

  “Do,” was the mildly acquiescent and somewhat saddish response; and the busy brush intermitted not, while the lean visitor remounting his lank albino, went on his way.

  But presently in an elevated turn of the hilly road man and horse, outlined against the vivid blue sky, obliquely crossed the Bohemian’s sight, and the next moment as if swallowed by the grave disappeared in the descent.

  “What is that verse in the Apocalypse,” murmured the artist to himself,
now suspending the brush, and ruminatingly turning his head sideways, “the verse that prompted Benjamin West to his big canvas?—‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death.’ Well, I wont allegorise and be mystical, and all that, nor even say that Death dwells not under the cemetery turf, since rather it is Sleep inhabits there; no, only this much will I say, that to-day have I seen him, even Death, seen him in the guise of a living man on a living horse; that he dismounted and had speech with me; and that though an unpleasant sort of person, and even a queer threatener withall, yet, if one meets him, one must get along with him as one can; for his ignorance is extreme. And what under heaven indeed should such a phantasm as Death know, for all that the Appearance tacitly claims to be a somebody that knows much?”

  Luck is a good deal in this world. Had the Bohemian, instead of chancing that way when he did, come in the same season but a few years later, the period of the present recital, who knows but that the opportunity might have been furnished him of sketching tattered Rip himself in his picturesque resurrection bewildered and at a stand before his own door, even as erewhile we left him.

  Ere sighting the premises, Rip’s doddered faculties had been sufficiently nonplussed by various unaccountable appearances, such as branch-roads which he could not recall, and fields rustling with young grain where he seemed to remember waving woods; so that now the absence of the old willow and its replacement by the lilac—a perfect stranger, standing sentry at his own door, and, as it were, challenging his right to further approach—these final phenomena quite confound him.

  Recovering his senses a little, while yet with one hand against his wrinkled brow remaining bodily transfixed, in wandering sort half unconsciously he begins:

  “Ay,—no!—My brain is addled yet;

  With last night’s flagons-full I forget.

  But, look.—Well, well, it so must be,

  For there it is, and, sure, I see.

  Yon Lilac is all right, no doubt,

  Though never before, Rip—spied him out!

  But where’s the willow?—Dear, dear me!

  This is the hill-side,—sure; the stream

  Flows yon; and that, wife’s house would seem

  But for the silence. Well, may be,

  For this one time—Ha! do I see

  Those burdocks going in at door?

  They only loitered round before!

  No,—ay!—Bless me, it is the same.

  But yonder Lilac! how now came—

  Rip, where does Rip Van Winkle live?

  Lilac? a lilac? Why, just there,

  If my cracked memory do’nt deceive,

  ’Twas I set out a Lilac fair,

  Yesterday morning, seems to me.

  Yea, sure, that it might thrive and come

  To plead for me with wife, though dumb.

  I found it—dear me—well, well, well,

  Squirrels and angels they can tell!

  My head!—whose head?—Ah, Rip, (I’m Rip)

  That Lilac was a little slip,

  And yonder Lilac is a tree!”

  But why rehearse in every section

  The wildered good-fellow’s resurrection,

  Happily told by happiest Irving

  Never from genial verity swerving;

  And, more to make the story rife,

  By Jefferson acted true to life.

  Me here it but behooves to tell

  Of things that posthumously fell.

  It came to pass as years went on

  (An Indian file in stealthy flight

  With purpose never man has known)

  A villa brave transformed the site

  Of Rip’s abode to nothing gone,

  Himself remanded into night.

  Each June the owner joyance found

  In one prized tree that held its ground,

  One tenant old where all was new,—

  Rip’s Lilac, to its youth still true.

  Despite its slant ungainly trunk

  Atwist and black like strands in junk,

  Annual yet it flowered aloft

  In juvenile pink, complexion soft.

  That owner hale, long past his May,

  His children’s children—every one

  Like those Rip romped with in the sun—

  Merrily plucked the clusters gay.

  The place a stranger scented out

  By Boniface told in vinous way—

  “Follow the fragrance!” Truth to own

  Such reaching wafture ne’er was blown

  From common Lilac. Came about

  That neighbors, unconcerned before

  When bloomed the tree by lowly door,

  Craved now one little slip to train;

  Neighbor from neighbor begged again.

  On every hand stem shot from slip,

  Till, lo, that region now is dowered

  Like the first Paradise embowered,

  Thanks to poor good-for-nothing Rip!

  Some think those parts should bear his name;

  But, no,—the blossoms take the fame.

  Slant finger-posts by horsemen scanned

  Point the green miles—To Lilac Land.

  Go ride there down one charmful lane,

  O reader mine, when June’s at best,

  A dream of Rip shall slack the rein,

  For there his heart flowers out confessed.

  And there you’ll say,—O, hard ones, truce!

  See, where man finds in man no use,

  Boon Nature finds one—Heaven be blest!

  A ROSE OR TWO

  PART I: AS THEY FELL

  The Ambuscade

  MEEK crossing of the bosom’s lawn,

  Averted revery veil-like drawn,

  Well beseem thee, nor obtrude

  The cloister of thy virginhood.

  And yet, white nun, that seemly dress

  Of purity pale passionless,

  A May-snow is; for fleeting term,

  Custodian of love’s slumbering germ—

  Nay, nurtures it, till time disclose

  How frost fed Amor’s burning rose.

  Amoroso

  ROSAMOND, my Rosamond,

  Of roses is the rose;

  Her bloom belongs to summer,

  Nor less in winter glows,

  When, mossed in furs all cosey,

  We speed it o’er the snows

  By ice-bound streams enchanted,

  While red Arcturus, he

  A huntsman ever ruddy,

  Sees a ruddier star by me!

  O Rosamond, Rose Rosamond,

  Is yonder Dian’s reign?

  Look, the icicles despond

  Chill drooping from the fane!

  But Rosamond, Rose Rosamond,

  In us, a plighted pair,

  Frost makes with flame a bond,—

  One purity they share.

  To feel your cheek like ice,

  While snug the furs inclose—

  This is spousal love’s device,

  This is Arctic Paradise,

  And wooing in the snows!

  Rosamond, my Rosamond,

  Rose Rosamond, Moss-Rose!

  The New Rosicrucians

  TO us, disciples of the Order

  Whose rose-vine twines the Cross,

  Who have drained the rose’s chalice

  Never heeding gain or loss;

  For all the preacher’s din

  There is no mortal sin—

  —No, none to us but Malice!

  E
xempt from that, in blest recline

  We let life’s billows toss;

  If sorrow come, anew we twine

  The Rose-Vine round the Cross.

  The Vial of Attar

  LESBIA’S lover when bereaved

  In pagan times of yore

  Ere the gladsome tidings ran

  Of reunion evermore,

  He wended from the pyre

  How hopeless in return—

  Ah, the vial hot with tears

  For the ashes cold in urn!

  But I, the Rose’s lover,

  When my belovèd goes