MELVILLE'S SHORTER POEMS
1043
occasionally does this imagery of the
sehenswurdig
really glow
with
a metaphorical luminosity, but this it does in "Pisa's Leaning Tower"
(with its metaphor of suicide), in the
~"{traordinary
Venetian poem
which Mr. Warren has analyzed, "In a Bye-Canal," and in the
familiar little exercise in the style of Landor, "The Ravaged Villa."
The volume would be notable, moreover,
if
it were only for the
now well-known and certainly remarkable poem, "After the Pleasure
Party," with its renewed use, after
Battle-Pieces,
of large astronomical
images- "starred Cassiopeia in Golden Chair"- and of other ele–
mental metaphors; prairie fires, here, and geysers, which become
symbols of sexual desire.
Most of the poems that Melville left in manuscript were evident–
ly the work of his very last days. Many of them are quiet to the point
of colorlessness, but what is most noteworthy about "Weeds and
Wildings" and the other miscellaneous poems is the almost complete
transformation of mood, after
Battle-Pieces
and
John Marr,
which
they embody. Quite gone are the elemental naturalistic images of the
one and the disastrous nautical metaphors of the other; in their place
appears the homely imagery of countrified retirement and quiet
domestic simplicity. Nothing could be more eloquent of the unpro–
testing tranquillity which Melville achieved at the end of his life than
this low-pitched poetry of weeds and wild-flowers, of red clover, hard–
hack, and sweetbriar, and of a bird life as far as possible from that
of
John Marr-a
life of which robins, bluebirds, meadow-larks, and
humming-birds are now characteristic. The prose dedication makes it
clear that the red clover is being quite consciously used as a metaphor
of humility, of the commonly and broadly human-almost like the
grass in Whitman- because it is "accessible and familiar to everyone,"
and "no one can monopolize its charm." Nor is it only the clover that
expresses this; so, too, do most of the symbols in these poems. The
tasseled corn of the western prairies appears, in a poem called "Tro–
phies of Peace," .as an emblem of unwarlike, undistinguished, un–
historied, tranquil human living; and when, in a very late poem,
"The Lake," Melville seeks to express his sense of the primordial
rhythms of death and rebirth, of decay and renewal, he does it
through the image of a small New England lake in the midst of pines,
from the banks of which one has glimpses, on the uplands beyond, of
barns and orchards and corn-fields, basking in the autumn sunlight.
