PARtiSAN
UYI~W
following with "untiring wing and lidless eye" the flagship that is
sailing proudly home from a great victory over the Spanish fleet,
portend the ironic disaster that overtakes
it:
The hungry seas they hound the hull,
The sharks they dog the haglets' flight;
With one consent the winds, the waves
In hunt with fins and wings unite,
While drear the harps in cordage sound
Remindful wails for old Armadas drowned.
The Admiral's ship is driven on a lee shore by a tempest when the
vessel's compass is thrown off-deflected by the heat of the captured
Spanish swords in the armchest nearby. And the dominant symbol
in
John Marr
is indeed the symbol of wreck and disaster: a deserted,
dismasted, drifting, waterlogged vessel in "The ./Eolian Harp"; in
"Far Off-Shore" a deserted raft flying its now ineffectual signal;
a martial ship, in "The Berg," that strikes an iceberg and goes down
without jarring the least spur or pinnacle of the great cold mass. The
"dead indifference" of the iceberg stands of course for the feeling–
less unconcern of the natural world generally, but there is restoration
and a new health in the transcendence of this hurtful knowledge;
such at least is Melville's last word in the volume:
Healed of my hurt, I laud the inhuman Sea–
Yea, bless the Angels Four that there convene;
For healed I am even by their pitiless breath
Distilled in wholesome dew named rosmarine.'X·
Many of the poems in the third volume,
Timoleon,
especially the
group called "Fruits of Travel Long Ago," were probably written
much earlier, when Melville was only beginning to try his hand at
verse, and perhaps for that reason they are for the most part tamer
and more conventional.
As
one would expect of poems suggested by a
certain kind of travel, their imagery is that of sight-seeing, almost
that of the guide-book; they abound in palaces, villas, and gardens,
in statues and paintings,
in
temples, cathedrals, and pyramids. Only
*
There is surely an unconscious but felicitous echo here of a passage in Ben
Jonson's
Masque of Blacknesse:
"You shall ... steepe/ Your bodies in that
purer brine, / And wholesome dew, call'd
Ros-marine."
The "Angels Four" are
doubtless those in the seventh chapter of Revelation.
