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PARTISAN REVIEW
and the grenadier, as well as of "the carved and castled navies,"
were past and gone, and that the days of the military railroad and
the torpedo boat had come to stay. Though that is only one of its
dimensions,
Battle-Pieces
derives much of its force from Melville's
conscious intention to place war
W here War beiongs–
Among the trades and artisans.
This, at any rate, was his conception of modern war as an
activity; it was very far from being his only feeling about the Civil
War as a crisis in American, indeed in human, history. On this
plane, his response to the catastrophe was extremely complex; anger,
pity, revulsion, the love of heroism, the hope of reconciliation-all
these, and more, were elements in it. But his deepest, most instinctive
apprehension of the war was none of these, but, as the metaphors tell
us, a radical, ambiguous emotion of mingled horror and elatedness,
of terrified jubilation-the appalled consciousness of looking on at
some wild, frightful, but nevertheless splendid ·convulsion in the
natural world; some sudden and shocking eruption, upon the smiling
scene, of primordial forces of destruction and re-creation.
Battie–
Pieces
is dominated by the imagery of astronomy (stars, constella–
tions, meteors, comets, eclipses), of meteorology (winds and storms,
thunder and lightning, rainbows), and of geology and geography
(earthquakes, cataracts, rivers, shores and strands, the sea, and the
primordial deeps).
It
may well be remarked, to be sure, that warfare
inevitably suggests to the poet, and indeed to the most prosaic re–
porter, the language of comets, storms, and thunder. This is true,
and Melville's naturalistic images are sometimes nothing but the
commonplaces of the war correspondent or the patriotic bard: "the
hurricane from the battery" ("The Eagle of the Blue") or Stone–
wall Jackson's "sword with thunder clothed" are traditional and banal
enough.
But mere adherence to tradition and convention will not account
for the intense force of the elemental imagery in the best poems of
Bailie-Pieces;
what lies behind them, and irradiates them, is some–
thing more profound and personal than that. This is certainly true,
in "The Portent," of John Brown's "streaming beard" as "the meteor
of the war"; it is true, in "Aurora Borealis," of the "steely play" of
