“silence like a poniard stabs, since there the low throb of the sea not heard is”

Clarel may be beautiful, in part, in its way, but the ground it covers is not. Melville started his career practically as a travel writer, recounting stories of some of the most beautiful places on earth. Here, in the Holy Land, he describes a desolate, alien wasteland. Clarel might have been a pilgrim to Mars.

From the first canto of the second part, “The Wilderness”:

Not from brave Chaucer’s Tabard Inn
They pictured wend; scarce shall they win
Fair Kent, and Canterbury ken;
Nor franklin, squire, nor morris-dance
Of wit and story good as then:
Another age, and other men,
And life an unfulfilled romance.

It’s a fair warning. Instead, this is what they are on their way to:

Their mount of vision, voiceless, bare,
It is that ridge, the desert’s own,
Which by its dead Medusa stare,
Petrific o’er the valley thrown,
Congeals Arabia into stone.
With dull metallic glint, the sea
Slumbers beneath the silent lee
Of sulphurous hills. These stretch away
Toward wilds of Kadesh Barnea,
And Zin the waste. (3.1)

This passage includes many motifs that will be repeated throughout the poem in descriptions of the Holy Land. There is the blankness motif, in “bare,” which pops up here and there, though I’m not quite sure to what effect, in all cases, in Clarel. “Petrific” is wonderful for its weirdness and the stoniness motif is all over the place. The sea is also everywhere; the narrator of Clarel relies heavily on seafaring metaphors throughout and there is always an overarching sense that this desert was once underwater. “Sulphurous” is menacing, as the constant acrid fumes of the Dead Sea.

Let’s press on:

They climb. In Indian file they gain
A sheeted blank white lifted plain—
A moor of chalk, or slimy clay,
With gluey track and streaky trail
Of some small slug or torpid snail. (3.8)

Blankness, check. Chalk covers both rock (it is one) and signs of the ocean (it is one). “Gluey,” “slug” and “torpid” are characteristically grotesque, like “congeals” above.

One more, shall we?

Abandoned quarry mid the hills
Remote, as well one’s dream fulfills
Of what Jerusalem should be,
As that vague heap, whose neutral tones
Blend in with Nature’s, helplessly:
Stony metropolis of stones. (4.2)

That last line doesn’t ring terribly well to my ears, but I suppose it’s not meant to. By this point all this description had me thinking of only one thing: the Encantadas. And then Melville went and practically said it outright, in the person of Agath, a Greek sailor. I could say so much about Agath, not least about his tattoo of the crucifix. But for now I’ll just give you his story about an island he and his mates once camped at:

“In waters where no charts avail,
Where only fin and spout ye see,
The lonely spout of hermit-whale,
God set that isle which haunteth me.
There clouds hang low, but yield no rain—
Forever hang, since wind is none
Or light; nor ship-boy’s eye may gain
The smoke-wrapped peak, the inland one
Volcanic; this, within its shroud
Streaked black and red, burns unrevealed;
It burns by night—by day the cloud
Shows leaden all, and dull and sealed.
The beach is cinders. With the tide
Salt creek and ashy inlet bring
More loneness from the outer ring
Of ocean.” (4.3)

Yes, I think I will say it again; Clarel can be quite beautiful. At least when you’re used to it.