1044
PARTISAN REVIEW
It is an extraordinarily peaceful and pastoral coda to a body of work
that had been predominantly stormy.
From the point of view of achieved form there is no denying
that Melville's poems are mostly very imperfect, and some of them
hopelessly so; everyone who has spoken of them at all has made
this observation, and with justice.
It
is not only that Melville began
writing verse too late in the day- he was at the end of his thirties–
ever to attain the technical sureness and resource that have to be
striven for early; there were other and deeper reasons, for which
there is no space here, why his verse should strike one in large part as
the work of an amateur of genius. The fact remains that, in at least
a score of poems, there is a fusion of image and emotion, of meaning
and language, so complete and so intense as to make all talk of
amateurishness impertinent. I would myself be inclined to make the
list of such poems a longer one than either Mr. Warren or Mr.
Matthiessen has done; but in any case I am sure that no careful reader
of Melville's verse as a whole would gainsay the extraordinary in–
terest it has as a revelation of his autumnal state of spirit-as a
revelation, too, of one of the great possibilities for the American mind
in Melville's time. The breath he had been healed by had indeed been
distilled in a wholesome dew, and as a result Melville had arrived at
a doubleness of vision, a flexible moral realism, such as one finds in
the work of few American poets of any generation.
At no time in his life had he been able to accept or tolerate
"the exorbitant hopefulness," as he called it, "juvenile and shallow,"
which was the spiritual morphia of his age, and which had been
expressed on a relatively high level by his great contemporaries,
Emerson and Whitman. Neither, on the other hand, however, did
he allow himself in his old age to succumb to the equally unmodulated
negations of his younger contemporaries, Mark Twain and Henry
Adams. His intuition of the crushing impassivity of physical nature
was as bitter as Adams's own-"Nature," he writes, "is nobody's
ally; 'tis well"- and like his own Sire de Nesle he had lost his thirst
for roving ; he had discovered that "terrible is earth." Like Mark
Twain, and much earlier than he, Melville had had to abandon the
conviction on which the republican order had on one side been
founded, and
