Amateur Reader, fellow pilgrim through Clarel, noted last week that Melville’s poetry is “often less poetic than his prose!” No joke! Walter Bezanson’s historical and critical note to the poem similarly explains, “Once we face up to the idea that Melville’s poetry is not an extension of the lyric vein of his famous novels but is a wholly new mode of contracted discourse we will be more ready to judge the poetry.”
He’s right. Now, this makes me a bit of an appreciationist when it comes to Clarel, because I genuinely, viscerally love the aesthetics of Melville’s more lyrical work. As anyone who’s ever read Moby-Dick knows, there is a quotable sentence on every page—something truly beautiful. Not that I know anything about aesthetics, per se. But it is to my taste, or whatever.
Most of Clarel is emphatically not to my taste in that way. But! That’s not quite right. On re-reading many passages, I felt for them more. The style and structure of the poem is something you have to really spend time with and almost make peace with. Bezanson mentions the weirdness and constrictingness of its meter, iambic tetrameter, and it is weird, and can be jarring to read. Sometimes things seemed to flow along, other times I felt I was stumbling physically on the words. The rhyme scheme is completely irregular, which almost unavoidably puts you on edge.
Melville also relies—or, probably, chose to use quite specifically—on any number of “poem words,” let’s call them. Things like “anon,” “e’en,” other clipped word forms, extra “ah”s and missing articles, to fit the meter. It gives the whole poem an artificial cast, which, of course, it already had from the simple fact of its being a 500-page epic poem instead of a novel.
But sometimes the poem is beautiful like other Melville is beautiful. Or is it? Perhaps I have only been sucked into its aesthetic world; I can be impressionable. But here:
The speaker sat between mute Vine
And Clarel. From the mystic sea
Laocoon’s serpent, sleek and fine,
In loop on loop seemed here to twine
His clammy coils about the three.
Then unto them the wannish man
Draws nigh; but absently they scan;
A phantom seems he, and from zone
Where naught is real tho’ the winds aye moan. (1.37)
For one thing, the rhyme scheme in this bit seems less stressful; I don’t know if it’s a Thing or truly a pattern, but it sounds well: ABAABCCDD. “Wannish” sounds a Melville word, and there’s something about that last line that makes me want to say it aloud (probably the same thing makes me like stuff like this).
I was thinking of putting up a similar passage, another really poetic one. How much of the book is like this? Ten percent?
I questioned the tetrameter at first. Would more “natural” blank verse be better? But then each line would be 25% longer. No no no! Tetrameter, please! And in slower passages, the short line (and short cantos) did help pull me along. Maybe Melville knew what he was doing. Still, I would not have minded a little more variety in the meter – the inset songs, for example, were usually a nice change.
Your point about the fill-in words is right, and a flaw. Some lines are to obviously pretzeled to make the rhymes work, too. Well, the same is true of much, shorter, tighter poems than this one.
Now, my question about the really striking, beautiful passages is: Do they all belong to the narrator? Do they all somehow invoke “the mystic sea”?
Yeah, 10%. Maybe 5%, maybe 15%. Something like that. I was sort of thinking that they did all belong to the narrator before, but considering my post from today on Agath’s story, I guess the answer would have to be no. Do they all invoke the mystic sea, though…well perhaps that is a question for a second read (?!?), but it sounds plausible.
I agree about the meter, and I think the rhyme scheme (or lack thereof) had more of an effect on the weirdness. And the short lines did tend to be helpful.
So I just put up my argument that the sea imagery is the bedrock of the poem. That makes no sense. That the poem floats on the sea imagery. I don’t know. A work in progress.
Right, there’s the other sea thread – the seafaring characters. I almost could not believe it when Rolfe turns out to be the protagonist (but not the author?) of Typee. Jesus Christ should have appeared in Tahiti!
I would definitely read this book again, and I know just when to do it. I would love to read it just after a trip to the Holy Land. Visit the Dead Sea, Mar Saba, the Church of the Nativity, and so on, and then test my impressions against Melville’s. I don’t know if this will ever happen.
I would read it again myself…which I will officially announce, I think, on Friday (shh!). But that’s the thing—I have zero desire, at least at this point in my life, to go to the Holy Land. Whereas I would be all over going to Tahiti or the Marquesas or what have you. I have always imagined the Holy Land something as Melville does describe it…as a wasteland.
So – this was a clever idea that wasn’t so clever – I’m reading Twain, The Innocents Abroad, as, I don’t know, an ironic counterpoint to Clarel. But I’m reading it so slowly that Twain is still in Russia, nowhere near Jerusalem. Anyway, Melville has moved Israel & Palestine up on my Travel Wish List, but compared to other Mediterranean destinations, it’s not very high.
I’ve got to go to Italy. When am I going to go to Italy?
A Pacific Polynesian trip would be spectacularly interesting. But the New Bedford Whaling Museum sounds all right, too!