Melville in the Darbies

SELECTED POEMS OF HERMAN MELVILLE edited by Hennig Cohen. 259 pages. University of Southern Illinois. $7.

Considering the Selected Poems of Herman Melville, it is lucky that Melville's literary reputation seems secure. But then, so did the Pequod.

There are passable poems here, but only a few. The great body of these verses are jounce-rhymed, solemn and obvious. The contrast with the majesty and freedom of the author's prose could not be greater. Where Melville could interrupt the action of Moby-Dick to supply the reader with treatises on the history and anatomy of whales and whaling, and not risk impatience, he rarely gets through a twelve-line poem without spreading a tedium so deadly that its fumes kill flying insects.

Darker Depths. It is idle to speculate on why the best of U.S. novelists was so wretched a poet. The reason may merely be that there is no connection between the two pursuits. At any rate, Melville wrote little if any poetry as a young man. He was a sailor, a travel and adventure memoirist (Typee), and a much-applauded literary figure who had no reason to believe his success would not continue. Then in 1851, at the age of 32, he wrote Moby-Dick. Its depths confused the critics, and it was not much praised or purchased.

From this point Melville's life darkened and turned inward. The reception of Moby-Dick was hardly the chief cause--the book itself is a darkening and a turning inward--but the book's lack of success cut at his spirits. It was in this hardly lyrical mood that he began to write poetry.

Melville could not get a publisher for his first sheaf of poems, but in 1866 Harper's published a collection called Battle Pieces. It was a distinctly civilian poetizing of the Civil War, notable for the rhyming of "Shiloh" with "lie low," and such sentiments as:

But the fieldmouse small and busy ant

Heap their hillocks, to hide if they may the woe:

By the bubbling spring lies the rusted canteen,

And the drum which the drummer-boy dying let go.

Embarrassed Presence. In Melville's defense, the lines are not all that bad (although some are worse). The average gets better--the book is arranged more or less chronologically--until occasionally whole poems are free of howlers. Still the reader finds Melville awkward and even embarrassed in the presence of poetry, as if poetry were attended by a duenna and not a muse. His enormously long philosophical poem Clarel, which is excerpted here, is a sober, jointy affair in which pilgrims clatter painfully about the Holy Land thirsting after truth amid the waterless cantos.

At least once, however, the duenna grew forgetful, and Melville briefly became a poet. Billy in the Darbies (manacles) could stand in almost any company. In fact, it stands with the best; it is the conclusion of Billy Budd. In its last lines Billy muses about death:

. . . But me they'll lash in hammock, drop me deep.

Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.

I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?

Just ease these darbies at the wrist, and roll me over fair,

I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.

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