1036
PARTISAN REVIEW
its expansiveness, its orotundity, its remoteness from speech-in the
interests of a vocabulary that should either be actively anti-poetic
or at any rate have a fresh expressiveness if only by virtue of its
felicitous oddity or its freedom from attrition. It is true, and quite
contradictory, that more than most of the bad poets of the time Mel–
ville was guilty of sprinkling his work with the stalest of stale poetic
archaisms; and that there are too few pages that are not defaced by
favorite nouns like
mart, wight,
and
elf,
or favorite verbs like
deem,
loom,
and
ween;
by rhymes like
prime, clime,
and
sublime,
and such
lines as "When, after storms that woodlands rue" or "Perfidious
deem its sacred glow." Hardy's pages, too, are strewn with withered
leaves like these, and Melville's strength, like H ardy's, lies elsewhere.
It
lies partly in the use of a powerfully prosaic vocubulary, of
terms that suggest business, industry, the law, and even mathematics.
Such terms as these are not ubiquitous in his verse, but when they do
appear they have, at least in some passages, an extraordinary effect
of blunt factuality or unromantic precision. One comes u!)on nouns
like
foreclosures, underwriters, operatives, fractions,
and
quotas;
ad–
jectives or participles like
geometric, ambiguous, legalized,
and
re–
vamped;
adverbs like
cogently
and
fun ctionally,
and the verb
rescind.
Most of these words are not used metaphorically, as Shakespeare or
Donne would have used them, but in their literal senses, and are thus
without the intense effect of metaphysical imagery, but in a few pas–
sages they do suggest something very like this. The word
foreclosures
does, in a stanza of the fine poem, "The March into Virginia":
Who here forecasteth the event?
W hat heart but spurns at precedent
And warnings of the wise,
Contemned foreclosures of surprise?
In a passage in "After the Pleasure Party" the language of mathe–
matics, perhaps with a reminiscence of the
Symposium,
is used in an
almost seventeenth-century manner:
What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder
The human integral clove asunder
And shied the fractions through life's gate?
The association, in the last line, of the language of arithmetic with the
