MELVILLE'S SHORTER POEMS
1037
language of village slang
(shied)
is what partly accounts for the
special wryness of the passage. And elsewhere the essentially logical
or rhetorical term,
ambiguous,
occurs with extraordinary force:
And over the spear-point of the shaft
J
saw the ambiguous lightning play.
Such words as these, however, are less frequent than another
kind of word, the rare, learned, often archaic, and sometimes ap–
parently invented term that suggests an almost Shakespearean-or,
again, Hardyesque-passion of linguistic creativeness. They are of
various sorts. Some of them are nouns derived rather forcibly and
even violently from verbs:
blastment
(which he may have remem–
bered from
Hamlet), disenslavers, impingers, transcender
(all of
which seem to be his own coinages). Melville-like Keats, here, it
must be said-had a love of rare adjectives derived from nouns and
given suffixes like
-less, -ful, -y,
or
-ly,
or the participial ending
which suggests a verb, not always an actual or even a possible one.
Tasteless and inexpressive as some of these are, his verse would not
have its particular quality of humorsome independence and tough
idiosyncrasy if it were not for words like
roofy, fellowly
(which may
have come from
The Tempest), funy,
and
fally
(the last two abor–
tions his own) : or
flushful
(his own coinage),
blastful,
and
aidful;
or
vowelled, foliaged, glenned,
and
interserted;
or
shroudless, quench–
less
(both in
Mob y Dick
and in "The Eagle of the Blue"),
termless,
and
noteless.
This last group at once suggests Hardy'S
lightless, grief–
less,
and
stormless;
and it is eloquent of the odd, unconscious sym–
pathy between the two poets that both of them should be found
using a form of the rare verb,
forefeel:
And faces fixed, forefeeling death.
(Melville, "The
Armies of the Wilderness")
((Maiden meet," held
J,
((till arise my forefell
Wonder of women."
(Hardy, "The Temporary the All")
On the other hand, Melville is uninventive of verbs; there is nothing
in his poems to parallel Hardy's
outshow, unknows,
or
inexist .
Very
uncommon is the forcible transformation of an adjective into a verb,
as in "The College Colonel":
