MELVILLE'S SHORTER POEMS
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Which holds that Man is naturally good,
A11d- more- is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged.
His awareness of human evil was as acute in the period when he
wrote his verse as it was when he was writing
Moby Dick:
Who weeps for the woeful City
Let him weep for our guilty kind.
His sense of moral irony, moreover, is a kind of setting-on-its-head of
the Emersonian "good out of evil":
Indolence is heaven's ally here,
And energy the child of hell;
The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear
But brims the poisoned well.
Yet at the end of his ordeal, unlike Henry Adams, Melville
could find the inward wholeness that kept him from being a victim
of what Blake called "single vision":
«Since light and shade are equal set,
A nd all revolves, nor more ye know;
Ah, why should tears the pale cheek fret
For aught that waneth here below.
Let go, let go!"
So, in "The Lake," he expressed his final sense of the contradictori–
ness, the moral chiaroscuro, of both experience and nature. Yet, des–
pite the language of this particular poem, the perception did not
lead him to a mere mystique of polarity, an unwise passiveness of
dialectical acceptance. In "The Conflict of Convictions," much
earlier, this essential insight had been so expressed as to give it an
ethical dimension, to make it involve the will, to provide for the
conscious counter-thrust of voluntary resistance:
I know a wind in purpose strong–
It spins
against
the way it drives.
Indeed, in the same poem, Melville had lifted this principle- the
creative interaction of opposites-to a religious level:
