Herman Melville- Complete Poems

by Herman Melville

  1862

  In mid-January the Melvilles take up temporary residence at 150 East 18th Street in New York, where Melville is bedridden by rheumatism. Herman Gansevoort dies March 18; Melville is too sick to travel north for his uncle’s funeral. Sisters Augusta and Frances inherit the property, thereafter the home for their mother, Maria Gansevoort Melville. Still recovering from a siege of rheumatism, returns in April to Pittsfield, where he puts Arrowhead up for sale. In September Lizzie’s share of Judge Shaw’s real estate in Boston set at $15,064.75. Moving to a rented house in the village of Pittsfield, is thrown from a wagon and severely injured.

  1863

  In March Lizzie buys from her brother-in-law Allan a property on East 26th Street, New York City, giving him the Arrowhead estate (valued at $3,000), $7,750 cash, and assuming a mortgage of $2,000 held by Allan’s late wife’s mother. On October 16 Lizzie watches at the deathbed of Pittsfield neighbor Sarah Morewood and helps to prepare her body for burial. In early November Melville and his family leave Pittsfield permanently (except for short visits), living thereafter in New York on East 26th Street.

  1864

  In April, rides on an overnight scouting expedition against the Confederate guerrilla John Singleton Mosby. In Plymouth, New Hampshire, Nathaniel Hawthorne dies, May 19, aged sixty.

  1865

  After the fall of Richmond in early April, works steadily on a book of Civil War poems.

  1866

  Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War published in New York by Harper & Brothers, August 23. Starts as an inspector of customs in New York, December 5.

  1867

  Her Boston family convinced that Melville is insane, Lizzie confides in her Unitarian minister, Henry W. Bellows, who suggests that she go to the Shaw house as if on a normal visit, then refuse to return to her husband. Instead, in a poem she resolves to “Hold on.” Oldest son, Malcolm, somehow shoots himself in bed, September 11. Brother Thomas elected Governor of Sailors’ Snug Harbor in Staten Island, November 19.

  1868

  Melville’s brother Thomas as the new Governor of Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Staten Island hosts Christmas dinner for the family, marking a shift of the family center from Gansevoort, New York, to the large and fully staffed Governor’s Mansion.

  1869

  Aboard the Yokohama son Stanwix sails for China in April. In late August Melville stays at the Curtis Hotel in Lenox, dining in the room where he presented Hawthorne with Moby-Dick. Now ignored himself, a customs inspector, Melville sees Hawthorne exalted as the great American writer, and through the autumn he broods on their friendship and their fates.

  1870

  Realizing that in an epic poem set in the Holy Land he can reflect on his relationship with Hawthorne, begins acquiring source books for Clarel. Sits for his portrait by Joseph Oriel Eaton, a gift for his mother, paid for by John C. Hoadley. As more of Hawthorne’s works appear posthumously, younger people begin to know Melville only as an acquaintance of Hawthorne during his last months in the Berkshires. In July son Stanwix returns from sea.

  1871

  At the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Fine Arts in New York City among the “most noticeable” portraits in the North Room, according to the New York Herald on April 17, is the one of Melville by “J. O. Eaton.”

  1872

  Brother Allan dies in New York City of tuberculosis, February 9. At the Governor’s Mansion in New Brighton, mother dies, April 1, aged eighty-one. The grieving Melvilles flee the 26th Street house soon after the funeral. Lizzie takes daughters to Boston while Melville and son Stanwix join Melville’s sister Augusta at brother Tom’s Governor’s Mansion in New Brighton, from which Melville commutes to work by ferry. In April Stanwix leaves for Kansas. Early May, Lizzie joins Melville at his refuge in the Governor’s Mansion on Staten Island.

  1873

  Melville being slated for removal, the Collector of the Port, Chester A. Arthur, a lover of Moby-Dick, intervenes and saves him from being fired.

  1874

  By the end of 1874 nearly completes his poem Clarel, at some 18,000 lines.

  1875

  On August 9, in Albany, reveals to his uncle, Peter Gansevoort, that he has a long poem complete in manuscript, and his uncle proposes to pay the expenses of its publication. In December Melville’s pay is reduced from $4 to $3.60 a day.

  1876

  Uncle Peter Gansevoort dies January 4. At the Governor’s Mansion of Sailors’ Snug Harbor sister Augusta dies April 4. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land published in New York by G. P. Putnam & Co., June 3. Melville’s pay is restored to $4 a day in September. In summer and fall John C. Hoadley pores over Clarel, understanding it, admiring it, and praising it within the family. Awarded $500 by Peter Gansevoort’s will.

  1877

  His working hours are temporarily increased June 30.

  1878

  Evert Duyckinck dies August 13.

  1879

  Authorizes the destruction of unsold copies of Clarel, which are cluttering the Putnam’s office, March 27. In Boston, Hope Savage Shaw dies intestate, August 13, so her heirs are her sons Lemuel and Samuel, not Melville’s wife and her older brother Oakes. In the late 1870s, works on two interrelated poems, “A Symposium of Old Masters at Delmonico’s” and “A Morning in Naples,” along with prose sketches introducing their fictional narrators; gives the whole project the inclusive working title of “Parthenope.”

  1880

  Daughter Frances marries Henry B. Thomas April 5.

  1881

  In the Helena, Montana, Independent of October 7, G. A. Townsend recalls that President Arthur in the 1870s, when he was Collector of the Port of New York, told him he “had much delight” in Melville’s novels and was “glad to keep him in a comfortable clerkship.”

  1882

  First grandchild, Eleanor Melville Thomas, born February 24.

  1883

  Second grandchild, Frances Cuthbert Thomas, born December 3.

  1884

  Brother Thomas dies suddenly at Sailors’ Snug Harbor, March 5. Lemuel Shaw, Jr., dies in Boston, May 6. When his estate is settled Melville’s wife, her brother Oakes, and her half brother Samuel share more than $300,000. One of a growing number of young British admirers, James Billson of Leicester, initiates a correspondence with Melville August 21. In the September Contemporary Review (London), the sea novelist W. Clark Russell praises Melville, calling Moby-Dick “his finest work.”

  1885

  Sister Frances dies July 9. In the August 15 London Academy Robert Buchanan calls Melville “the one great imaginative writer fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman” in North America. Billson sends a copy of the magazine to Melville. Melville resigns from the Custom House December 31. Writes one of his many sea pieces, a ballad, “Billy in the Darbies,” about a sailor the night before his execution for mutiny, perhaps in 1885.

  1886

  Continues to work on the “Parthenope” poems and sketches and also works on a prose account of Billy Budd that began as a headnote to the ballad. Second son, Stanwix, dies in San Francisco, February 23. Brother-in-law John C. Hoadley dies October 21.

  1887

  Late summer or fall, writes an early draft of his dedicatory essay for “Weeds and Wildings.”

  1888

  Early in the year makes a fair copy of Billy Budd but is led into further revisions. Brother-in-law George Griggs dies in Boston, May 8. Melville writes his will June 11, leaving everything to his wife. In September the New York printer T. L. De Vinne publishes for Melville John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces, in an edition of twenty-five copies. In November turns again to the story of Billy Budd. Older sister Helen Griggs dies in Roxbury, Massachusetts, December 14.

  1889

  On November 21 Archibald MacMechan writes Me
lville from Halifax, Nova Scotia, that he reads and rereads Moby-Dick “with increasing pleasure on every perusal.” Not encouraged by Melville, he nevertheless labors for decades to spread the fame of the book in the United States and in the British Empire.

  1890

  Drops the prose sketches from the “Parthenope” manuscripts and now entitles the poems “At the Hostelry” and “An Afternoon in Naples in the Time of Bomba,” perhaps in 1890. Acknowledges receipt of $8,000 from the estate of his wife’s cousin, Ellen M. Gifford, March 5.

  1891

  In April again thinks he has finished Billy Budd, and again is drawn into further revisions. In June, New York’s Caxton Press publishes for Melville his Timoleon and Other Ventures in Minor Verse, in an edition of 25 copies. Continues to work on “Weeds and Wildings” as late as August. Melville dies September 28, leaving behind the uncompleted Billy Budd manuscript and the uncompleted manuscripts of “Weeds and Wildings,” the “Parthenope” poems and prose pieces, “Rammon,” “Story of Daniel Orme,” “Under the Rose,” and some three dozen poems of varying lengths.

  Note on the Texts

  BY ROBERT A. SANDBERG

  This volume collects all of Herman Melville’s poems except for a few that he included in prose works. Thus it contains Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces (1888), and Timoleon Etc. (1891), followed by two uncompleted collections that Melville never published, Weeds and Wildings and Parthenope, and a group of uncollected poems and related prose pieces (all, with one exception, left unpublished by him).

  Melville was a reader and composer of poetry throughout his career. During the eleven years preceding his decision in the late 1850s to begin composing the verse pieces that he attempted in 1860 to publish as a first volume of collected poems (to be titled Poems by Herman Melville), he composed poetry and songs for his prose writings, including Mardi and Moby-Dick. However, the poems or songs that Melville incorporated in the prose fiction he published from 1846 to 1857 are not taken out of context for inclusion in the present volume. Two poems from Mardi and Moby-Dick—Yoomy’s song from chapter 88 of Mardi (“Like the fish of the bright and twittering fin”) and the hymn read by Father Mapple in chapter 9 of Moby-Dick (“The ribs and terrors in the whale”)—were printed in 1993 by the Library of America (LOA) in volume 2 of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, edited by John Hollander. That volume also includes fifty-one of the poems printed in the present volume: fourteen from Battle-Pieces, thirteen from Clarel, eight from John Marr, twelve from Timoleon, two from Weeds and Wildings, and two from the uncollected poetry and prose-and-verse pieces, “Billy in the Darbies” and “Pontoosuc.” The text of “The Tuft of Kelp” from the “Sea-Pieces” section of John Marr and Other Sailors was printed in 2000 by LOA in American Sea Writing: A Literary Anthology, edited by Peter Neill. Like the texts printed in the present volume, the texts in the 1993 and 2000 LOA volumes are those of the related volumes of the Northwestern-Newberry (NN) edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, edited by Hershel Parker, Harrison Hayford, G. Thomas Tanselle, Alma A. MacDougall, Robert D. Madison, and Robert A. Sandberg and published by the Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library. However, because the 1993 and 2000 LOA volumes were printed while the two final NN volumes were still in progress (Published Poems, 2009, and “Billy Budd, Sailor” and Other Uncompleted Writings, 2017), the slightly different, corrected texts of the NN volumes (and thus those of the present volume) supersede those of the 1993 and 2000 LOA volumes. For example, for the 2017 Uncompleted Writings volume the NN editors determined that Melville did not intend a final “e” in the title of the uncollected poem “Pontoosuc.”

  The present volume includes (with the exceptions noted above) all the poems Melville is known to have composed from the late 1850s to the day of his death on September 28, 1891, both those he published and those he left in manuscript, unpublished, in various stages of near-completion. The texts used in this volume come from the following three NN volumes: Published Poems (Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds., 2009), the source for Battle-Pieces, John Marr, Timoleon, and the uncollected poem, “Inscription For the Dead At Fredericksburgh”; Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds., 1991), the source for Clarel; and “Billy Budd, Sailor” and Other Uncompleted Writings (Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Robert A. Sandberg, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds., 2017), the source for Weeds and Wildings, Parthenope, “Rammon,” “Under the Rose,” “Billy in the Darbies,” and thirty-eight uncollected poems, including the verse-epistle, “To Daniel Shepherd.”

  The NN editors had four main types of documents from which to choose copy-texts and sources of emendation that could be used to generate critical editions of the reading texts: the first editions of the printed volumes of poetry in which Melville participated at various stages of the printing and publishing process, the printer’s-copy manuscript used to set type for a first edition, galley or page proofs marked by Melville, and the uncompleted and unpublished manuscripts that he left behind in various stages of near-completion at the time of his death in 1891. For Clarel and the Published Poems volumes, the NN editors adopted as copy-texts and sources for emendation the manuscripts or first editions and associated surviving galley and page proofs that could be shown to contain his revisions or corrections. For the Uncompleted Writings volume—with two exceptions—the copy-texts were the surviving holograph manuscripts. The two exceptions involve the first-edition printings of the two poems he extracted from already inscribed manuscripts for publication in John Marr and Timoleon (see below). The NN texts (and thus the texts printed in the present volume) are critical texts because they do not correspond to any documentary texts—whether in print or manuscript—but instead include emendations of words, punctuation, and spelling that the editors concluded would best reflect Melville’s latest intention. In addition, following their editorial policy, the NN editors did not modernize punctuation, spelling, or capitalization to conform with modern usage, nor, when emending, did they impose consistency in punctuation, spelling, and capitalization in the reading texts or tables of contents (variations in spelling and capitalization were accepted in printed works before and during the years Melville was writing). This general description of the editorial work done on the NN volumes does not account for the unique situations that come up in connection with many of the poems and related prose pieces in this volume. For thorough discussions and explanations of how the editors worked with manuscripts, first editions, and galley and page proofs to produce critical reading texts, the reader is referred to the editorial appendices of the published NN volumes listed above.

  There is no single holograph manuscript for Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, nor were there new printings or editions of Battle-Pieces in Melville’s lifetime; thus the copy-text used for the NN edition is simply the text published by Harper & Brothers on 23 August 1866. The five poems that were published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine prior to the printing of the book edition were considered as possible copy-texts for those poems, but the NN editors determined that the differences between those texts and the texts of the printed volume were probably due to changes Melville made later in printer’s copy for the Harper volume. The primary sources for most of the emendations made by the NN editors were the two copies of Battle-Pieces at Harvard (designated Copies A and C), which contain annotations and revisions by Melville.

  The text of the first edition of Clarel was set from Melville’s manuscript, but that printer’s-copy manuscript is not known to survive; thus the copy-text used by the NN editors was the first edition published in two volumes by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in early June 1876—June 3 according to a letter Melville’s wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville, wrote to Melville’s cousin, Catherine Gansevoort Lansing
. There does exist one manuscript containing lines from Clarel inscribed in Melville’s hand: a twenty-one-line lyric, “Ditty of Aristippus” (corresponding to the opening lines of Canto 4, Part 3), which Melville copied out twelve years later, in 1888, in response to a written request on January 20 from the prominent anthologist Edmund Clarence Stedman for “one of your best known shorter poems, in your own handwriting.” The NN editors concluded that neither of the two manuscript variations from the 1876 edition, both in the last line—“revellers” instead of “revelers” and a period instead of an exclamation point—warranted an emendation in the NN text. A custom-bound copy of the Putnam edition at Harvard (designated Copy B) combines both first-edition volumes into one and contains notes for corrections and revisions in Melville’s hand—evidence taken into account by the NN editors when emending the copy-text.

  Melville selected the De Vinne Press as printer of John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces and personally financed the production of the twenty-five copies, finished in late August or early September 1888. His name appears nowhere in the book. Melville’s manuscript, “John Marr and Other Sailors,” in Harvard MS Am 188 (370), served as printer’s copy (with one exception related to “The Haglets” discussed below). Because he worked closely with the De Vinne Press, the NN editors were able to use the surviving galley and page proofs, which he had marked up extensively, as sources for emendations in the manuscript copy-text. They also used printed copies, which Melville continued to revise during the next three years. Having located eighteen of these printed copies into which Melville or his wife had inscribed revisions, the editors adopted eleven of these revisions.

  No manuscript of “The Haglets” existed when the De Vinne compositors were setting type, so Melville had to create printer’s copy from two newspaper versions (one complete, the other abridged) that had been published three years earlier in 1885. The two newspaper versions were not titled “The Haglets,” but instead had the same title as that of an uncollected poem printed in the present volume—“The Admiral of the White.” Both the complete and the abridged versions were published on Sunday, May 17, 1885: the complete version in the Boston Herald and the abridged in the New York Tribune. To prepare printer’s copy for the De Vinne Press, Melville used ink-revised, scissored-apart sections of the abridged Tribune version, which he pasted onto leaves, leaving space between sections for the ink-inscribing of the missing lines taken from the complete Herald text. Revisions to the newspaper texts included revising the title from “The Admiral of the White” to “The Haglets.” Though the 1885 newspaper versions had the same title as an uncollected poem printed in the present volume, we can conclude from a note written by Melville’s wife on the first page of the manuscript of the uncollected poem (“Herman gave this to Tom—”) that Melville must have composed it before 1885—his brother Tom died in 1884.