MELVILLE'S
SHORTE~
POEMS
When, cut by slanting sleet, we swoop
Where raves the world's inverted year.
Hunt then the flying herds of themes!
When Asia scarfed in silks came on
Against the Greek and Marathon.
The spider in the laurel spins,
The weed exiles the flower.
1039
There is more than a suggestion in these last four lines, as there is
elsewhere in Melville, of some of the French Parnassians, especially
Gautier, whom he pretty certainly did not know.
The imagery of Melville's poems deserves a study by itself, and
I have space for only a few remarks here. It is striking, for one thing,
that the range of imagery varies interestingly and revealingly from
volume to volume of the three collections Melville published during
his life and the collection he left in
manuscript-Battle-Pieces, John
M arr and Other Sailors, Timoleon,
and the manuscript poems. In
all of them, and especially in
Battle-Pieces,
one has to make a simple
distinction between the pictorial imagery, the imagery "given" by
the themes themselves, and the true metaphors. The pictorial imagery
of
Battle-Pieces
is of course the imagery of war, and here it is not
too much to say that Melville is the first poet in English to realize the
meaning of modern technological warfare, and to render it, grimly
and unromantically, in his work. He is the Brady of Civil War poetry
- in a sense in which none of the others, not even Whitman, was. It
is true that
Drum-Taps
is pitiless enough in evoking the horrors of
warfare-the shocking wounds, the atrocities of surgery, the stretchers
and the bandages-but this does not suffice to destroy its prevailing
atmosphere of dreamy strangeness and tender solemnity. Melville's
war poetry is not mainly the poetry of fitfully-flaming bivouac fires
or mystical vigils kept on the field at night; it is the harsher poetry
of mathematics and machinery, of what he calls "plain mechanic
power," the poetry of the military engineer and technician, of gun–
boats and torpedoes and ironclads, of grape and canister, of earth–
works and rifle-pits and batteries, of wagons mired in the mud and
shrapnel screaming through the air. Remote as he was personally from
the war itself, Melville discerned as a poet that the days of the dragoon
