Melville at Woods Hole

A storm is a strophe. The net of history

Will open above you again, compel you back

To the niche and sheet of the past

Where you are nothing; will take in the one cast

These seaboard villages, this heaving thicket of sea

Where blunder your frantic, huntsman’s hands. The seven

Winds of our news will hawk

At your name shivering on the cleared blue mizzen of heaven.

It is an illusion, a dream then, that these are still

And always yours, the sculptured shadows of the coves

Crocketed with weathered houses

And wharves askew; that the falling glass arouses

Your voice, dazing the clouds; that your antique will

Whitens into sail and is ever outward bound,

While over lifting waves

Come skipping like thin stones the spinet voices of the drowned.

It is a trick of the rain dismantles together

Four roadstead centuries in a staggered curio-shop—

New England in one wry gable.

The engine crouching by the wharf is a shimmering fable

Of timelessness. Only in sheer weather

We think of the sun as a wagon capsized and burning

To nothing, each yellow hoop

Loosened, the unseated wheels slower and slower turning.

With words as firebreaks, from the centre of fierce art

You hold out your hands. But all is kindling for the blaze,

Mossed bone or hump-backed folio.

The gesturing spar back to its wreck must flow.

Out from Nantucket, cutting your dreams to the heart,

Drives the spry steamer. These, the vacationers, owe

Only their empty snapshot gaze

To a blind old fisherman hunched in his soiled blue.

In eighteen-twelve the Chinese sailor, falling

Back from the maintop to the glittering, turning deck,

To the white, swaying arms,

Knew truth for a second: the night watch: the dim alarms:

In what he had sought and loved destruction calling,

In the cruel puzzle of the rigging, in the simple swell.

The spin of his curious luck,

Wordless, foreshadows your tortuous parable.

Words followed, and art—the carved, grey, perfect rock

Near Boston Common. But God’s acre is pressed hard,

The words and the strange winged head

Shallow in the scoop of the wind. This mortal bread

Of Man, hurled to distant waters, has drifted back.

A squirrel, electric shadow, may seem to pause

Vaguely as a sphinx, on guard:—

All passes. Cars swing to the terminus.

But wakens the lighthouse, peers to the green, turbulent east.

The crazy captain, whose eyes are a flenching knife,

Starting, cries up all hands.

Melville, it is bone you rest on, bone that bends

But does not break. Gulls at each springing crest

Wander, in their thirsting bodies is the germ,

The impulse of death and of life:

They are anchors dragging at a sea and a sky of storm.

Night’s province dowses lighted waters. You pace

The shaken bridge, your maiming inheritance knocks

At our hearts, inescapable,

Hastens us past the breakwaters, the shoal bell,

For the devious truths of nightmare where rip-tides race

And seasons spindle to the ice-floe. Swiftly we move,

Hull down, under heeling trucks,

Towards the white, flying vision of terror and love.