Notes

BATTLE-PIECES

The Portent

John Brown and twenty-one followers captured the military arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia on October 16, 1859 in an attempt to inspire a slave insurrection. He was tried on charges of treason and conspiring with slaves to commit treason and murder, convicted, and hanged on December 2, 1859.

 

ll.3-4. The Shenandoah Valley was known for its great beauty but also as the site of General Stonewall Jackson’s diversionary campaign of May-June 1862, which halted General George B. McClellan’s advance on Richmond. It was also the site of General Philip Sheridan’s efforts as commander of the Middle Military Division from 1864-1865. Hence, it is a scene of pastoral peace that became crossed by war.

 

l.5. John Brown’s capture resulted in several cuts to his head.

The Conflict of Convictions

[Melville’s Note]. The gloomy lull of the early part of the winter of 1860-1, seeming big with final disaster to our institutions, affected some minds that believed them to constitute one of the great hopes of mankind, much as the eclipse which came over the promise of the first French Revolution affected kindred natures, throwing them for the time into doubt and misgivings universal.

 

l.10. In Milton Paradise Lost, the Archangel Raphael is by God sent to forewarn Adam and Eve of Satan and thereby, “to render man inexcusable.” An “enthusiast” means, literally, one inspired by divinity, though Melville may be suggesting something more ironic by the phrase “white enthusiast.”

 

l.44. An “Iron Dome” was under construction for the Capitol to replace the old wood and brick one demolished in 1855. Melville visited Washington in March 1861 and witnessed the construction. Melville also refers to the Iron Dome as a symbol of the state in “The Scout toward Aldie” (ll. 32-35) and “Lee in the Capitol” (l. 33, 38).

 

l.61. Daniel 7:9.

Apathy and Enthusiasm

l.38. Erebus, the son of Chaos and brother of Night, personifies darkness, but is also the name of the cavern through which the souls of the dead pass on their journey through Hades.

The March into Virginia

The poem marks the first major engagement of the war which took place on July 21, 1861, along Bull Run near Manassas Junction, a railroad depot between Richmond and Shenandoah Valley. Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard and twenty-four thousand of his troops defeated thirty thousand Union soldiers under General Irvin McDowell.

 

l.23. See Milton’s catalog of demons in Paradise Lost I: 392-393: “First Moloch, horrid King besmear’d with blood / Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears.”

Ball’s Bluff

Lincoln granted his friend and former senator Colonel Edward D. Baker permission to make a “demonstration” against Confederate positions on the fords of the Potomac near Ball’s Bluff, Virginia. On October 21, 1861, Baker and many of his men were ambushed and killed, and Lincoln was criticized severely for allowing the operation.

DuPont’s Round Fight

This celebrates the Northern victory in which the Union fleet, commanded by Admiral Francis DuPont, attacked Forts Walker and Beauregard on Port Royal Sound, South Carolina, November 7, 1861. The maneuver secured a base of operations along the South Atlantic coast. The battle plan of attack, to which Melville refers, and which was reported in The Rebellion Record, was for the ships to steam down the river in a circle or an ellipse and then steam up the river in a similar form.

Donelson

The Confederacy surrendered Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River near Dover, Tennessee, on February 16, 1862. More important, it became a crucial point in the war as Grant clearly rose to prominence as a victorious general. In strategic terms, Grant was able to split the South by using the Cumberland and the Mississippi as lines of operation.

The poem’s shifting “aspects” include those watching the bulletin board (roman type, past tense) and those participating in battle (italics, present tense), North and South as they are afflicted by weather.

The details of Melville’s poem, which begins on February 12 and continues until the following Sunday, are taken from The Rebellion Record.

 

ll.1-3. Confederate Commissioners John Slidell and James Mason were forcibly removed from the British mail steamer Trent by a Union warship on November 8, 1861.

 

l.80. William R. Morrison was wounded leading an attack on Confederate troops.

 

l.115. Cf. Milton, Comus, 428: “By grots and caverns shagged by horrid shades.”

 

l.160. A Copperhead was Northern Democrat who favored a negotiated peace with the South.

In the Turret

The day after the Confederate ironclad Merrimac sank the Cumberland , Lieutenant John Cumberland Worden arrived commanding the Union ironclad Monitor. In the ensuing battle of March 9, 1862, neither ironclad was able to sink the other. The Merrimac did not attack the Union fleet again but did prevent McClellan’s army from receiving adequate naval support. Worden received injury to his eyes when shots from the Merrimac forced eye and paint fragments from the eye-holes or slits of the pilot-house into his eyes. He survived. The Monitor eventually sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras on December 31, 1862.

 

ll.5-6. Alcides is the patronymic of Hercules. He descended into Hades to recover Alcestis who had died so that her husband might be saved.

 

ll.15-16. Cf. Deuteronomy 3:11: “For only Og king of Bashan remained of the giants; behold his bedstead was a bedstead of iron.”

The Temeraire

[Melville’s Note]. The Temeraire, that storied ship of the old English fleet, and the subject of the well-known painting by Turner, commends itself to the mind seeking for some one craft to stand for the poetic ideal of those great historic wooden warships, whose gradual displacement is lamented by none more than by regularly educated navy officers, and of all nations.

See J. M. W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. Melville saw the painting while in the National Gallery in London in 1857. The name “temeraire” means “one who dares.”

 

l.20. [Melville’s note]. Some of the canon of old times, especially the brass ones, unlike the more effective ordnance of the present day, were cast in shapes which Cellini might have designed, were gracefully enchased, generally with the arms of the country. A few of them—field-pieces—captured in our earlier wars, are preserved in arsenals and navy-yards.

A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight

The Union ironclad Monitor engaged the Confederate Merrimac at nine A.M. on May 9, 1862 in Hampton Roads, Virginia. It withdrew after two hours to replenish ammunition but returned to battle an hour later. The Merrimac fired on the Monitor’s sight holes and blinded its commander Lieutenant Worden (see “In the Turret”). Neither ship was sunk but the Monitor successfully prevented the the Merrimac from destroying the Federal fleet.

ll.20-22. Cf. Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” l.4: “And fired the shot heard round the world.”

Shiloh

The site in Tennessee of the battle that began on Sunday, April 6, 1862 when the Confederate Army, led by Albert Sidney Johnson, attacked Grant’s troops as they were moving south. There were enormous casualties on both sides in the two-day battle: more than thirteen thousand Union; more than ten thousand Confederate, including Johnson. Both sides claimed victory, though the Confederate troops were forced to retreat. Melville’s poem, significantly, does not emphasize the battle but the ironic reconciliation in death, the fields, the swallows. The swallows frame the poem, and the church is at the center.

 

Title. Cf. Judges 18: 31; 19.

 

l.14. Cf. Joshua 22: 11-12 And the children of Israel heard say, Behold the children of Reuben and the children of Gad and the half tribe of Manasseh have built and alter over against the land of Can-nan in the borders of Jordan, at the passage of the children of Israel. And when the children of Israel heard of it, the whole congregation gathered themselves together at Shiloh to go up to war against them.

 

In the Biblical account of Joshua, the alleged rebellion of the tribes is seen as a misunderstanding and they become reconciled peacefully with Israel. Though it is not stated precisely when in the Bible, God eventually destroys Shiloh as punishment for the Israelites’ failure to keep his covenant.

Battle of Stone River, Tennessee

Also known as the Battle of Mursfreesboro, Tennessee, this four-day battle near the Stones River began on December 30, 1862. William Rosencrans commanded the Union Army of the Cumberland against Braxton Bragg of the Confederate Army of Tennessee. The outcome was indecisive, and Bragg withdrew his troops.

The conceit of the poem is Melville’s comparison of this battle with two battles of the English Wars of the Roses, Tewkesbury and Barnet Heath. The epigraph of the poem refers to Melville’s visit to Oxford on May 3-4, 1857, just prior to his return to the United States from journeying in Europe and the Levant.

 

l.1. In Tewkesbury on April 14, 1471 and May 3, 1471, Edward IV of York defeated the Lancastrians and ended the fratricidal Wars of the Roses.

 

l.6. Druids were ancient Celtic priests who worshiped the mysteries of the past within mystical tree cult.

 

l.23. John C. Breckenridge commanded the division that covered Bragg’s retreat.

The House-top

The speaker is observing from his roof top the New York draft riots on the sweltering night of July 11, 1863. In March 1863, Congress had passed the First Conscription Act that permitted those who were financially able to purchase draft immunity for three hundred dollars. Poor New Yorkers responded by rioting, looting, and even lynching African Americans. Militia units eventually put down the riots.

 

l.9. Sirius in Canis Major is called the Dog Star because it follows its master Orion, the brightest star in the sky. The star’s name is from the Greek Seiros, meaning hot or searing. Hence, the “dog days” of summer, July 3 to August 11 when Sirius, according to tradition, rises with the sun, increasing its heat. “Dog days” are also a period when dogs are vulnerable to rabies.

 

l.16. [Melville’s Note]. “I dare not write the horrible and inconceivable atrocities committed,” says Froissart, in alluding to the remarkable sedition in France during his time. The like may be hinted of some proceedings of the draft-rioters.

 

l.19. Draco was the first law scribe of ancient Greece and the archon eponymous for the severe laws that were transcribed in 621 B.C. The death penalty was often invoked for even minor offenses.

 

l.21. Calvin’s doctrine of original sin and natural depravity. l.27. Acts 16: 37-38 and 22: 25-29. Paul invoked his right as Roman citizen to exemption from scourging. The final line is, strikingly, in the hexameter of Virgilian epic.

The Armies of the Wilderness

Grant’s Army of the Potomac fought Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia near the Rapidan River in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains on May 5-7, 1864. There were more than twelve thousand casualties but the battle was indecisive. The Virginia battleground was heavily forested and crossed by streams. It also had been the site of the battles around Chancellorsville, May 1-4, 1863, to which Melville also refers. Melville’s poem is set before the battle begins and considers the unusual perspective of Union soldiers witnessing through field glasses Confederates playing baseball.

 

l.161. Grant’s headquarters from March 26 to May 4, 1864.

 

l.170. Orpheus was given a lyre by his father, Apollo, and became so accomplished that he could tame wild beasts.

 

l.171. Stonewall Jackson was fatally wounded at Chancellorsville after outflanking the Union army.

 

l.210. On May 6, 1864, General James Longstreet sent his troops through an unfinished railroad cut for a successful attack on a Federal flank but was wounded by one of his own men.

 

ll.216-218. Cf. Exodus 13-21: “And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light, to go by day and night.”

 

l.220. Melville refers here not to the Sabaeans mentioned in the Old Testament but to the Sabaeans of Harran in northern Syria, a pagan sect whose transcendent theology could be characterized as astral and Neoplatonic; they became associated with hermetic religious traditions and the Egyptian priest Hermes Trismegistus. They came into conflict with Islamic Sabians in the ninth century, who characterized the Sabaeans of Harran as idol worshippers. Their name means “to turn or convert to a new God.”

On the Photograph of Corps Commander

Winfield Scott Hancock commanded the Second Corps in the Spotsylva nia Campaign of May 7-20, 1864. Harper’s Weekly of May 28, 1864 featured a portrait of Hancock as its cover illustration.

 

l.15. 1415 the English, though outnumbered, defeated the French at Agincourt in northern France.

 

l.18. The Knights Templars were a military and religious order founded around 1118 in Jerusalem to protect Pilgrims visiting the Holy Land.

The Swamp Angel

[Melville’s Note]. The great Parrott gun, planted in the marshes of James Island, and employed in the prolonged, though at times intermitted bombardment of Charleston, was known among our soldiers as the Swamp Angel.

St. Michael’s, characterized by its venerable tower, was the historic and aristocratic church of the town.

Sheridan at Cedar Creek

The Confederate troops under General Jubal Early had nearly won the battle of Cedar Creek, Virginia until Union General Philip Sheridan made his legendary ride from twenty miles away in Winchester. Sheridan’s counterattack won the battle for the Union, which still lost more than five thousand men as the Confederates lost more than three thousand. The poem first appeared in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in April 1866 as “Philip,” though it seems to celebrate the horse, Winchester, as much as the rider. It was the one poem of Battle-Pieces to receive some recognition and to be anthologized during Melville’s lifetime. It is worth comparing with the well-known poem “Sheridan’s Ride,” originally published in November 1894, by Thomas Buchanan Read.

 

l.26. See John 26 11:1-43.

The College Colonel

William Francis Bartlett was a colonel whose 49th Regiment was being honored in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in August, 1863. Melville saw Bartlett at an engagement in his honor hosted by Sarah Morewood. Bartlett had left Harvard College and enlisted in the Union army as private. He became a captain in the 20th Massachusetts Regiment and then lost a leg in the Peninsular Campaign in 1862. He led a regiment in the Wilderness fighting of 1864 and was known for leading his troops into battle with his crutch strapped across his saddle. The copy of Battle-Pieces that Melville presented him in 1867 survives.

A Dirge for McPherson

[Melville’s Note]. The late Major General McPherson, commanding the Army of the Tennessee, a native of Ohio and a West Pointer, was one of the foremost spirits of the war. Young, though a veteran; hardy, intrepid, sensitive in honor, full of engaging qualities, with manly beauty; possessed of genius, a favorite with the army, and with Grant and Sherman. Both generals have generously acknowledged their professional obligations to the able engineer and admirable soldier, their subordinate and junior.

In an informal account written by the Achilles to this Sarpedon, he says: “On that day we avenged his death. Near twenty-two hundred of the enemy’s dead remained on the ground when night closed upon the scene of action” (251).

It is significant of the scale on which the war was waged, that the engagement thus written of goes solely (so far as can be learned) under the vague designation of one of the battles before Atlanta.

At the Cannon’s Mouth

On October 27, 1864, Lieutenant William B. Cushing and a volunteer crew of fifteen sank the Confederate ram Albermarle at Plymouth, North Carolina as it was about to undertake a mission against the Union fleet. They succeeded by attaching a torpedo to a spar but only Cushing, who was only twenty-one, and one other member of his crew survived or evaded capture.

 

l.20. Adonis spurned the love of Venus, goddess of beauty, to hunt the boar.

The March to the Sea

General William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta on November 17, 1864 and began his march toward Savannah, which he reached without serious opposition on December 10. The destructive path his army cut through Georgia and South Carolina was justified as military “necessity” and “treason’s retributions.” Melville drew on Major George Ward Nichols’s The Story of the Great March, of which he owned a copy, for some of the material of the poem, particularly the description of gamecocks kept as pets by Union soldiers.

 

l.91. Cf. Paradise Lost, IV, 393-94: “So spake the Fiend, and with necessity, /The Tyrant’s plea, excus’d his devilish deeds.”

The Frenzy in the Wake

[Melville’s Note]. This piece was written while yet the reports were coming North of Sherman’s homeward advance from Savannah. It is needless to point out its purely dramatic character.

Though the sentiment ascribed in the beginning of the second stanza must, in the present reading, suggest the historic tragedy of the 14th of April, nevertheless, as intimated, it was written prior to that event, and without any distinct application in the writer’s mind. After consideration, it is allowed to remain.

Few need be reminded that, by the less intelligent classes of the South, Abraham Lincoln, by nature the most kindly of men, was regarded as a monster wantonly warring upon liberty. He stood for the personification of tyrannical power. Each Union soldier was called a Lincolnite.

Undoubtedly Sherman, in the desolation he inflicted after leaving Atlanta, acted not in contravention of orders; and all, in a military point of view, if by military judges deemed to have been expedient, and nothing can abate General Sherman’s shining renown; his claims to it rest on no single campaign. Still, there are those who can not but contrast some of the scenes enacted in Georgia and the Carolinas, and also in the Shenandoah, with a circumstance in a great Civil War of heathen antiquity. Plutarch relates that in a military council held by Pompey and the chiefs of that party which stood for the Commonwealth, it was decided that under no plea should any city be sacked that was subject to the people of Rome. There was this difference, however, between the Roman civil conflict and the American one. The war of Pompey and Caesar divided the Roman people promiscuously; that of the North and South ran a frontier line between what for the time were distinct communities or nations. In this circumstance, possibly, and some others, may be found both the cause and the justification of some of the sweeping measures adopted.

ll.11-12. Judges 4: 2-23. Barak, encouraged by Deborah, raised an army and defeated Sisera, general of Jabin, king of Canaan, who held Israel in captivity. Sisera thought he had found refuge in the tent of Jael but she slew him as he slept by driving a nail through his temple.

The Surrender at Appomatox

Lee attempted to join forces with Gender Joseph E. Johnson, who was pressured north by Sherman. Grant blocked Lee’s effort and brought about Lee’s surrender at the Appomatox Courthouse, Virginia on April 9, 1865.

 

l.8. Grant thought that it would be an unnecessary humiliation to call upon Confederate officers to deliver their swords as part of the terms of surrender.

 

ll.11-12. Caesar defeated Pompey at Pharsalus, Greecein 48 B.C. and is the subject of Lucan’s epic Pharsalia.

The Martyr

Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. on Good Friday, April 15, 1865 and died the next morning.

 

l.21. [Melville’s note]. At this period of excitement the thought was by some passionately welcomed that the Presidential successor had been raised up by heaven to wreak vengeance on the South. The idea originated in the remembrance that Andrew Johnson by birth belonged to that class of Southern whites who never cherished love for the dominant: that he was a citizen of Tennessee, where the contest at times and places had been close and bitter as a Middle-Age feud; that himself and family had been hardly treated by the Secessionists.

But the expectations built hereon (if, indeed, ever soberly entertained), happily for the country, have not been verified.

Likely the feeling which would have held the entire South chargeable with the crime of one exceptional assassin, this too has died away with the natural excitement of the hour.

 

l.28. God to Cain Genesis 4:11: “And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand.”

“The Coming Storm”

A landscape painting by Sanford R. Gifford that Melville saw on exhibit at the National Academy of Design in New York, shortly after the assassination of Lincoln. The catalog listed the owner as Edwin Booth, an actor famous for his interpretations of Shakespearean tragedies, particularly Hamlet, and also the brother of John Wilkes Booth. After Lincoln’s death, John Booth retired temporarily from theater.

Rebel Color-Bearers at Shiloh

[Melville’s Note]. The incident on which this piece is based is narrated in a newspaper account of the battle to be found in the “Rebellion Record.” During the disaster to the national forces on the first day, a brigade on the extreme left found itself isolated. The perils it encountered are given in detail. Among others, the following sentences occur:

“Under cover of the fire from the bluffs, the rebels rushed down, crossed the ford, and in a moment were seen forming this side the creek in open fields, and within close musket-range. Their color-bearers stepped defiantly to the front as the engagement opened furiously; the rebels pouring in sharp, quick volleys of musketry, and their batteries above continuing to support them with a destructive fire. Our sharpshooters wanted to pick off the audacious rebel color-bearers, but Colonel Stuart interposed: ‘No, no, they’re too brave fellows to be killed.’ ”

The Muster

[Melville’s Note]. According to a report of the Secretary of War, there were on the first day of March, 1865, 965,000 men on the army pay-rolls. Of these, some 200,000—artillery, cavalry, and infantry—made up from the larger portion of the veterans of Grant and Sherman, marched by the President. The total number of Union troops enlisted during the war was 2,668,000.

“Formerly a Slave.”

An ecphrasis of Jane Jackson, formerly a Slave-Drawing in oil-color by Elihu Vedder, which was listed in the 1865 exhibition catalog of the National Academy of Design. Vedder recounts in his journals how he encountered Jackson, who was selling peanuts on a street corner near his Broadway studio. Melville became a lifelong devotee of Vedder’s work, particularly his version of Kayam-Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat. Though he never met Vedder, Melville dedicated Timoleon (1891) to him.

On the Slain Collegians

[Melville’s Note]. The records of Northern colleges attest what numbers of our noblest youth went from them to the battle-field. Southern members of the same classes arrayed themselves on the side of Secession; while Southern seminaries contributed large quotas. Of all these, what numbers marched who never returned except on the shield.

 

l.21. Saturnians refers to the golden age of the Gods and the influence of the planet Saturn. The Vale of Tempe at the base of Mount Olympus in Greece was legendary for its beauty.

 

ll.33-34. The Apollo Belvedere portrays the god just after he has slain Python, the serpent bred in the slime of the receding flood. The Pythian games honored Apollo’s feat. Melville owned a reproduction of J. W. M. Turner’s engraving Apollo Killing Python, which he saw in the National Gallery in London. Apollo purified himself in Tempe after killing the monster.

America

l.3. Coma Berenices is named after Berenice, the Egyptian queen who pledged her hair to Venus for safe return of her husband from war.

 

l.30. The Gorgons were three-snake-haired sisters so terrible that when anyone gazed upon them they were instantly turned to stone.

On the Home Guards

An outnumbered Union regiment commanded by Colonel James Mul ligan surrendered to General Sterling Price on September 20, 1861, after eight days of fighting because of the weakness, as Melville’s poem suggests, of the Home Guard.

The Fortitude of the North

On August 29-30, 1862, the Second Battle of Manassas was fought between the Union Army of Virginia under John Pope and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under General Robert E. Lee. It was a repeat of the first Confederate victory at Manassas of July 1861.

 

l.5. The “Cape of Storms” was Cape Horn, which Melville himself had experienced in hellish weather in 1860.

An Uninscribed Monument

In a miserably failed attempt to drive Lee’s troops from Marye’s Heights, west of Fredericksberg, Virginia, General Ambrose E. Burnside, commanding the Army of the Potomac, drove his troops through the town and against a stone wall and sunken road at the base of the hill. Burnside’s army had 12,700 casualties trying to drive Lee from the hill; Lee’s losses were 5,300. Burnside eventually withdrew his troops.

On a Natural Monument

[Melville’s Note]. Written prior to the founding of the National Cemetery at Andersonville, where 15,000 of the reinterred captives now sleep, each beneath his personal head-board, inscribed from records found in the prison-hospital. Some hundreds rest apart and without name. A glance at the published pamphlet containing the list of the buried at Andersonville conveys a feeling mournfully impressive. Seventy-four large double-columned pages in fine print. Looking through them is like getting lost among the old turbaned head-stones and cypresses in the interminable Black Forest of Scutari, over against Constantinople.

Commemorative of a Naval Victory

l.8. The Titian suggested here is “The Man with a Falcon.”

 

l.27. See also “The Haglets,” “In a Bye-Canal,” “The Maldive Shark.”

The Scout toward Aldie

In April of 1864, Melville had set out with his brother Allen to join his cousin Colonel Henry Gansevoort with the 13th New York Cavalry at Vienna, Virginia, which was operating against Mosby’s Raiders, a guerrilla band that had been organized in 1863 by Colonel John S. Mosby to divert attention from the main Confederate army. Melville obtained a pass to go on a cavalry raid into the wilderness where Mosby’s raiders were operating.

 

l.22. [Melville’s Note]. In one of Kilpatrick’s earlier cavalry fights near Aldie, a Colonel who, being under arrest, had been temporarily deprived of his sword, nevertheless, unarmed, insisted upon charging at the head of his men, which he did, and the onset proved victorious.

 

[Melville’s Note]. Certain of Mosby’s followers, on the charge of being unlicensed foragers or fighters, being hung by order of a Union cavalry commander, the Partisan promptly retaliated in the woods. In turn, this also was retaliated, it is said. To what extent such deplorable proceedings were carried, it is not easy to learn.

South of the Potomac in Virginia, and within a gallop of the Long Bridge at Washington, is the confine of a country, in some places wild, which throughout the war it was unsafe for a Union man to traverse except with an armed escort. This was the chase of Mosby, the scene of many of his exploits or those of his men. In the heart of this region at least one fortified camp was maintained by our cavalry, and from time to time expeditions were made therefrom. Owing to the nature of the country and the embittered feeling of its inhabitants, many of these expeditions ended disastrously. Such results were helped by the exceeding cunning of the enemy, born of his wood-craft, and, in some instances, by undue confidence on the part of our men. A body of cavalry, starting from camp with the view of breading up a nest of rangers, and absent say three days, would return with a number of their own forces killed and wounded (ambushed), without being able to retaliate farther than by foraging on the country, destroying a house or two reported to be haunts of the guerrillas, or capturing non-combatants accused of being secretly active in their behalf.

In the verse the name of Mosby is invested with some of those associations with which the popular mind is familiar. But facts do not warrant the belief that every clandestine attack of men who passed for Mosby’s was made under his eye, or even by his knowledge.

In partisan warfare he proved himself shrewd, able, and enterprising, and always a wary fighter. He stood well in the confidence of his superior officers, and was employed by them at times in furtherance of important movements. To our wounded on more than one occasion he showed considerate kindness. Officers and civilians captured by forces under his immediate command were, so long as remaining under his orders, treated with civility. These things are well known to those personally familiar with the irregular fighting in Virginia.

Lee in the Capitol

(April 1866). Lee actually arrived in Washington on February 16, 1866 and left on February 20. Melville may have taken poetic liberty with the date because the war began and ended in the month of April.

 

[Melville’s Note]. Among those summoned during the spring just passed to appear before the Reconstruction Committee of Congress was Robert E. Lee. His testimony is deeply interesting, both in itself and as coming from him. After various questions had been put and briefly answered, these words were addressed to him:

“If there be any other matter about which you wish to speak on this occasion, do so freely.” Waiving this invitation, he responded by a short personal explanation of some point in a previous answer, and, after a few more brief questions and replies, the interview closed.

In the verse a poetical liberty has been ventured. Lee is not only represented as responding to the invitation, but also as at last renouncing his cold reserve, doubtless the cloak to feelings more or less poignant. If for such freedom warrant be necessary, the speeches in ancient histories, not to speak of those in Shakespeare’s historic plays, may not unfitly perhaps be cited.

The character of the original measures proposed about time in the National Legislature for the treatment of the (as yet) Congression ally excluded South, and the spirit in which those measures were advocated—these are circumstances which it is fairly supposable would have deeply influenced the thoughts, whether spoken or withheld, of a Southerner placed in the position of Lee before the Reconstruction Committee.

 

l.37. John Pope was the Federal general defeated by Lee at the Second Battle of Manassas (August 29, 1862).

 

l.187. Lucius Cornelius Sulla was the first Roman to lead an Army against Rome. A general in the civil war against Marius (88-82 B.C.), he became a brutal dictator.

CLAREL

Part I: Jerusalem

I. The Hostel

Clarel, a bookish student in his chamber, is preparing to see the Holy Land for himself.

 

l.10. Vigil of Epiphany is a church festival on January 6 celebrating the Magi visiting the infant Jesus in Bethlehem.

 

l.29. Jaffa Port of entry for tourists and pilgrims going to Jerusalem.

 

l.39. Song of Solomon 2.1: “the Rose of Sharon.”

 

l.65. Salem is ancient name for Jerusalem. Samarcand is an ancient city of Central Asia and a symbol of romance.

 

l.109. Vesta is Roman virginal divinity.

XIII. The Arch

While visiting Jerusalem the American millennialist Nehemiah, Clarel encounters Celio, an Italian hunchback with a beautiful face, who lives in a Franciscan monastery. Celio has challenged the Roman Church and his faith. He and Clarel have a mystical encounter at the arch across the Via Dolorosa called Ecce Homo (Behold the Man), where Pontius Pilate presented Jesus to the people for judgment, but they do not exchange words.

 

l.47. Matthew 27:46: “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

 

l.74. John 10:23-24: “And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon’s porch. Then came the Jews round about him, and said unto him, How long dost thou make us doubt? If thou be Christ, tell us plainly.”

XVII. Nathan

Nathan is an American Gentile Zionist farmer and the father of Ruth, who was betrothed to Clarel. This canto tells his history from Puritan New England youth to Illinois farmer, which in some respects epitomizes a great deal of American social and intellectual history.

 

l.18. Esdraleon is the major open area of central and northern Palestine.

 

l.38. A river along with the Amonoosuc that rises in the White Mountains of New Hampshire (see also line 83).

 

l.305. The Pequods of Connecticut were a band of Algonquians who killed numerous settlers and were exterminated as a tribe in 1637.

Part II: The Wilderness

IV. Of Mortmain

A Swede and former idealistic leader of the French Revolution of 1848 who had been betrayed, Mortmain now wanders the earth an outcast and profound skeptic, convinced of the presence of evil. His name, which in legal terms signifies perpetual ownership by ecclesiastical entities and corporations, means “dead hand,” and he seems plagued by the relentless and imprisoning presence of unchanging history and the material world.

 

l.29. George Psalmanazar (1679-1763) was the pseudonym of a French adventurer whose real identity was never revealed. His Memoirs were published in 1764.

 

l.124. Micah 6.8: “. . . and what doth the Lord require of thee . . . but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk, humbly with thy God?”

 

ll.133-134. Medea murdered her two children.

 

l.143. Circe turned Odysseus’s men swine but was his lover for a year. She then advised him how to sail safely by the sirens by being bound to the mast.

XXII. Concerning Hebrews

The debate between the pilgrims Rolfe, Derwent, Vine, and Clarel is inspired by their fellow traveler Margoth who is a geologist and a Jew but utterly without interest in religion or religious arguments. In this light, Rolfe considers such Jews as Heinrich Heine and Baruch Spinoza.

l.63. Uriel Acosta (1585-1640) a philosopher and theologian was born a Portuguese Jew and raised a Catholic. In Amsterdam the synagogue excommunicated him but he rejoined only to be excommunicated. He rejoined and committed suicide.

 

l.66. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was a lyric poet and critic who renounced Judaism for Christianity.

 

l.77. The Neoplatonic School at Alexandria (300-400 A.D.) sought to reconcile Judeo-Christian and ancient Greek philosophy.

 

l.84. Moses Mendelsshon (1729-86) was a German Jewish philosopher and theologian.

 

l.96. Johann Neander (1789-1850) was an historian of Christianity and the son of a Jewish peddler named Emmanuel Mendel. He changed his name to Neander at seventeen and was baptized.

 

l.110. Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) philosopher of Jewish birth who lived in Amsterdam and worked as lens grinder. His Ethics (1677) has often been viewed as an argument for a rational love of God, divergent from the claims of scripture.

XXXI. The Inscription

The pilgrims travel south through Sodom and Gomorrah and westward along the Dead Sea, passing by the ruins of the ancient city of Pe tra, which Rolfe describes in great detail. The landscape is desolate but Nehemiah sleeps in the shade of a rock which bears the “Slanting Cross” and inscription.

 

l.97. Thor is the Norse God of thunder and armed with a magic hammer that returns to him when thrown.

XXXIV. Mortmain Reappears

The pilgrims have camped for the night near the Dead Sea. The next day they explore the shore and hear Margoth’s challenges to biblical accounts of its origins. Mortmain has chosen to remain behind at El isha’s Fountain where Christ was tempted by Satan in the wilderness.

 

l.10. Hecla ice was created from a massive volcano in southwestern Iceland.

l.20. See 1 Kings 17:1-7 Cherith was the brook where Elijah was hid and fed by ravens.

 

l.40. Vox Clamans is the “Voice Crying” in the wilderness of John the Baptists “he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord . . .” (Matthew 3:1-3).

 

l.63. Exodus 15:23: The Israelites in the wilderness “could not drink of the waters of Marah, for they were bitter.”

XXXV. Prelusive

A meditation on the “Imaginary Prisons,” (Carceri) a set of sixteen haunting etchings executed in the 1740s by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78). They represented for Melville “the mystery of iniquity.” The canto is “prelusive” to his vision expressed in the next canto of what brought about the destruction of Sodom.

XXXVI. Sodom

l.23. Revelations 8:10-11: “And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of the waters;

 

“And the name of the star is called Wormwood, and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.”

Part III: Mar Saba

V. The High Desert

l.26. Ibrahim Pasha (1789-1848) was a brutal Egyptian general who controlled Syria from 1832-1841.

 

l.40. Gnosticism was a heretical religion forged of western and eastern elements that developed in the first century of Christianity and emphasized a dualistic cosmology and gnosis, a form of knowledge used to penetrate divine mysteries. It viewed the created world as the work of an evil demiurge, often represented as the God of the Old Testament. Any form of salvation must be regarded in complete antithesis to this God through gnosis. Melville’s interest in Gnosticism and its related formulations such as Manichaeanism and Zoroastrianism can be seen in Moby-Dick (particularly “The Candles,” but not only), Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” See also the poem “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the Twelfth Century.” Followers of such heretical views such as the Cathars were at times subjected to persecution by the Roman Catholic Church. Cf. “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the Twelfth Century.”

 

l.68. In 1616, the Inquisition forced Galileo to recant his advocacy of the Copernican system.

 

l.89. The Capet kings (987-1328), with four exceptions, are buried in the cathedral of St. Denis along with all of the later kings of France through the nineteenth century.

 

l.103. The Sibylline Books contained oracles from the Cumaean Sibyl on all matters of Roman religious worship and law and were kept in Rome until A.D. 405.

 

l.133. The Tartar invasion, fall of Pekin and end of the Ming dynasty occurred in 1644.

 

l.140. A.U.C.: Anno urbis conditae—from the founding of the city (namely, Rome), in 753 B.C.

 

l.201. The witch of Endor whom Saul consulted (I Samuel 28. 7-14).

XXIX. Rolfe and the Palm

The pilgrims have traveled up the mountains of Judah to the monastery of Mar Saba where they rest, wander about the convent, and meditate on a palm tree jutting from a ledge as a possible sign of grace. While the others meditate Rolfe has an elaborate reverie of a lost arcadia. Mortmain has disappeared.

 

l.11. Mother-Cary’s bird is a sailor’s term for a small petrel.

 

l.38. The Fons Bandusia are celebrated in Horace’s Odes.

 

l.47. Alvarro Mendana de Neira was sixteenth-century explorer who discovered and named the Marquesas Islands.

XXXII. Empty Stirrups

ll.15-16. 1 Kings 18.7: “And as Obadiah was in the way, behold Elijah met him: and he knew him, and fell on his face, and said, Art thou that my Lord Elijah?”

Part IV: Bethlehem

XX. Derwent and Ungar

Derwent has been debating Don Hannibal, a disillusioned reformado (reformed) from the Mexican revolution (1858-61). Derwent believes in liberation and the possibilities of revolution, reform, progress, and democracy. Ungar, who has joined the travelers, disagrees. He is a part Native American ex-officer of the Southern Confederacy who has arrived in Mar Saba, “a wandering Ishmael of the West,” to perform mercenary military services for the Egyptians and Turks.

 

l.1. God spoke to Elijah, unlike Moses or Job, in a “still small voice.” (1 Kings 19:11-12).

 

l.45. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-80), Roman Emperor and author of Meditations. See also Melville’s poem “The Age of the Antonines” in Timoleon.

 

l.117. The Palais des Tuileries, formerly the royal residence, near the Louvre. Its main wing was burned in the revolution of 1871.

XXX. The Valley of Decision

The pilgrims ride toward the Cistern of Kings, where the Magi watered their camels. Clarel discovers the bodies of Ruth, his betrothed, and her mother, Agar, who have died in grief over the drowning of their father and husband, Nathan.

 

Title. Joel 3:16: “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision.

The sun and the moon shall be darkened, and the stars shall withdraw their shining.

The Lord also shall roar out of Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem; and the heavens and the earth shall shake: but the Lord will be the hope of his people, and the strength of the children of Israel.”

 

l.9. Coquimbo is a province in Chile.

XXXII. Passion Week

Passion week or Holy Week is the week before Easter. Palm Sunday is the first day of Holy Week, followed by Holy Thursday and Good Friday.

 

l.104. John 14:16: “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever.”

 

l.104. Erebus is the son of Chaos.

XXXIII. Easter

ll.57-58. Thammuz is a Syrian deity celebrated in the seasonal resurrection of nature.

 

l.65. Matthew 28.6: “He is not here: for he is arisen, as he said.”

XXXIV. Via Crucis

The Via Crucis or Way of the Cross is also known as Via Dolorosa (Way of Sorrow), along which Jesus passed to his crucifixion.

 

l.34. Whitsunday is the seventh Sunday after Easter when the apostles were visited by cloven tongues of fire. (Acts 2:1-14)

JOHN MARR AND OTHER SAILORS

Tom Deadlight

Ship decks had thick panes of glass set in them called deadlights designed to provide light below.

Jack Roy

The subject of the poem recalls Jack Chase, the captain of the U.S.S. United States with whom Melville served in 1843-44. Melville also describes him as the captain of the maintop of the frigate Neversink in White-Jacket (see chapter 4). He also dedicated Billy Budd to him.

The Haglets

The poem first appeared in The New York Daily Tribune in a shorter version as “The Admiral of the White,” dedicated to his recently deceased brother Tom. The original title refers to the white ensign with the red cross of St. George flown by a British admiral’s ship. The revised title refers to the birds that are flying above the doomed ship (sometimes called kittiwakes). A similar story appears in Clarel as “The Timoneer’s Story.”

The Maldive Shark

The Maldive Sea is southwest of India.

TIMOLEON, ETC.

Timoleon

Melville’s sources for this poem about fratricide included both Plutarch and Pierre Bayle’s Dictionary. Timoleon was the younger brother of Timophanes, a ruthless Corinthian tyrant. He participated in the assassination of his brother but was denounced by his mother and his people, and the poem focuses on his twenty years of exile.

After the Pleasure Party

The poem from lines 1-110 is a monologue spoken by Urania, who in classical mythology is a daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and one of the Nine Muses and the Muse of Astronomy. Nathanial Philbrick (1991) has argued that the speaker may have been modeled on Maria Mitchell (1818-89), the first woman American astronomer, whom Melville met on Nantucket in 1852. She has been at a party at a Mediterranean Villa and attempts to resolve the conflict between her love of science and her erotic desires. From lines 111-130, the poet speaks of Urania as she stands in the statue garden of the Villa Albani in Rome. The next stanza returns to the voice of Urania as she contemplates entering a nunnery and prays to the “armed Virgin.” The concluding stanzas, lines 148-157, return to the voice of the poet and the question of art as form of salvation from desire. It is apparent from several drafts of the poem in Melville’s hand, and that of his wife, that he considered several titles including “Urania,” “A Boy’s Revenge,” and “A Boy’s Revenge, or After the Pleasure Party.”

The Garden of Metrodorus

Metrodorus of Chios was a radically skeptical ancient Greek philosopher known for such statements as “We nothing, no, not even whether we know or not,” from the opening of his treatise On Nature. Melville may also have had in mind Metrodorus of Lampascus, a disciple of Epicurus.

The Bench of Boors

The poem is likely based on a painting of a tavern scene by Flemish painter David Teniers (1610-90).

 

Art

l.10. Genesis 32:24-32.

C—’s Lament

“C” is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Melville refers to, among other works, the poet’s “Dejection: An Ode” (1802).

Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the Twelfth Century

Gnosticism was a heretical religion that developed in the first century of Christianity and combined elements of eastern and western thought. Its cosmology is decidedly dualistic, the world being the work of an evil demiurge often represented as the God of the Old Testament. Transcendence can be achieved only through knowledge or gnosis of a realm in opposition to the worldly. Cf. Clarel Part III: iv.

The Marchioness of Brinvilliers

Marie Marguerite d’Aubray, marquise de Brinvilliers (1630-76) was a French aristocrat who poisoned her father and brothers and was executed. Melville visited the Louvre in November 1849 and probably saw a famous crayon sketch of her execution by Charles Le Brun that was displayed there.

The Age of the Antonines

The two Antonines were the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius, the adopted son of the Emperor Hadrian, who reigned from A.D. 138-161 and his adopted son Marcus Aurelius, who ruled until A.D. 180. Melville’s primary source for discussion of this period of sound government was Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire .

Herba Santa

Title is Spanish for “Holy Weed.” Melville loved tobacco.

 

In a Bye-Canal

l.6. Judges 4:2-23

The Apparition

During his 1857 journey in Athens, Melville noted in his journal that “the Parthenon elevated like a cross of Constantine.” The poem recalls how the Parthenon dominates Athens from the citadel of the acropolis and that this had been supplanted by the cross that converted Roman Emperor Constantine (A.D. 272?-337) to Christianity.

 

l.9. Diogenes (412?-323 B.C.) was a Cynic philosopher, a school of thought that believed virtue to be the only good and achievable through self-control. Melville puns on “cynic” which in Greek means “dog.”

 

In the Desert

l.1. Exodus 10:21-29.

 

l.3. Priests of Thebes on the upper Nile.

 

l.10. At the Battle of the Pyramids, July 1798, when the French defeated the Malmuke Army.

 

l.16. See Paradise Lost, Book III, 11:1-6.

 

l.17. Shekinah is the majestic presence or manifestation of God that has descended to dwell with man.

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

The New Ancient of Days

The occasion of the poem is the discovery in 1835 by paleontologist Philippe Charles Schmerling of human fossil remains in the Engihoul cavern in Belgium. The title derives from the Book of Daniel 7:9, “I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days did sit.” Melville conflates the titles of two of Darwin’s books, The Descent of Man and On the Origin of Species.

Camoens

Melville was an admirer of Luis de Camoens’s (1524-80) epic Os Lu siads, which recounts the voyages of Vasco de Gama. Camoens died impoverished in Lisbon.

Montaigne and His Kitten

The essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), who was awarded the Order of St. Michel by Charles IX in 1571, had a kitten named Blanche.

Pontoosuce

A lake north of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Melville’s manuscript reveals he considered giving it the title of “The Lake.”