1038
PARTISAN REVIEW
An Indian aloofness lones his brow.
In
any case, however, Melville's verse
is
not dependent on nonce–
words and rarities for its verbal intensity. Again and again, even in
poems that miss fire as a whole, he exhibits the genuine poet's native
mastery over language by
his
use of a familiar or not unfamiliar word
in a manner that suddenly confers upon it a magical potency. Some–
times the spark is struck by a single noun or a noun and its adjective
together:
.
And a singe runs through lace and feather.
With golden mottoes in the mouth.
Sometimes it is an adjective or a verbal adjective strangely and trans–
fixingly used:
The moody broadsides, brooding deep.
Each bloomed and died an unabated Boy.
Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine.
Or the two fine lines which Mr. Warren has quoted:
(
Weird John Brown).
Perish, enlightened by the volleyed glare.
But Melville can use familiar verbs with an equally ironic or an equal–
ly strange and connotative effect:
We fought on the grass, we bled in the corn.
The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the
driving keel.
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
Nirvana! absorb us in your skies,
Annul us into thee.
In
the last line it is of course the use of a word bristling with legal
or commercial connotations, but in
.a
mystical context, and followed
by an unidiomatic phrase ("into thee"), that accounts for the poig–
nancy of the effect.
In
other lines it is not easy to distinguish between
the
mana
of single words and that of the metaphor:
