MELVILLE'S SHORTER POEMS
1041
the Northern Lights that sinK and fade with coming of peace; and
it holds, in a poem like "A Canticle," for the strange, cloudy, con–
fused, hilt exciting imagery of precipice, cataract, thunder, and gorge,
or in a greater poem, "The Conflict of Convictions," for the complex
imagery of returning comets, of wreck-strewn ,;trands, of the mmer
in the cave, of "Derision" stirring "the deep abys,<," anJ the "slimed
foundations" of the gulf laid bare. In the fine poem, "Misgivings,"
the metaphor of the tempest is usr.d with
mag~lificent
freshness for the
expression of a kind of exhilarated dismay.
Some of the finest images in
Battle-Pieces
are images of the
ocean and especially of the seashore; one turns to the later volume,
John Marr and Other Sailors,
and finds these images on every page.
Naturally enough, given the very title of the collection; but in any case
there can be few poets anywhere, since Camoens, more genuinely
sea-going than Melville.
John M arr
smells of salt air and seaweed–
it reverberates with the uproar of storms at sea-as very little poetry
in
Englis~
or perhaps any modem language does. For most poets to
whom the sea has been a profound symbol-for Heine, for Whitman,
for Rimbaud- it has been the sea mainly as a landsman would view
it and know it, the sea as envisaged from the shore or in imagination,
a symbol of freedom and infinitude. Melville is a rare case of a
serious poet who had also been a sailor before the mast, and even
when one has made every deduction for the amateurishness of some
of these poems, one is bound to feel that the sea exists in his verse
with a kind of cruel, bitter, but still salubrious reality with which it
exists in few of the others.
It appears mainly as a symbol of destructiveness and terror; it
is still the sharkish sea of
Mob
y
Dick.
The sea-creature that appears
most characteristically is in fact the shark; the shark that already, in
Battle-Pieces,
"glides white through the phosphorous sea," and that re–
appears here as the ferocious Maldive Shark, with its saw-pit of a
mouth and its charnel of a maw:* Even the sea-fowl which appear,
and there are several of them- gannets and petrels, the white goney,
the man-of-war hawk-are birds of ill omen for the most part. The
most sinister are the haglets or shearwaters which appear in the
powerful narrative poem, "The Haglets," and which, inscrutably
*
One recalls the shark in Leconte d e Lisle's poem,
Sacra Fames,
"the sinister
Prowler of the steppes of the sea."
