'Superfluous Business Still We Shun'

How good to have Herman Melville’s Complete Poems in a single, portable volume, thanks to the Library of America. I already had Clarel and Published Poems, volumes 11 and 12 in The Writings of Herman Melville from Northwestern University Press, but each is an ungainly behemoth and after years of use the covers are worn and the spines are cracking. Melville, with Emily Dickinson, is the foremost American poet of the nineteenth century, and our greatest Civil War poet, though as a writer of verse he remains underappreciated. The editor of Complete Poems is Hershel Parker, who is also general editor of the fifteen-volume Writings of Herman Melville. In his “Note on the Text,” Parker reminds us: “Melville was a reader and composer of poetry throughout his career.”

His poetic masterpiece is Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War(1866), including what may be his finest poem, “Lee in the Capitol (April, 1866).” Left unpublished though probably written around the time of Battle-Pieces is “Inscription for the Dead at Fredericksburgh [sic]”:

“A dreadful glory lights an earnest end;

In jubilee the patriot ghosts ascend;

Transfigured at the rapturous height

Of their passionate feat of arms,

Death to the brave’s a starry night,—

Strewn their vale of death with palms.”

Browsing in Complete Poems, I’m reminded of Melville’s generally unrecognized sense of humor. The one time I met the novelist John Gardner (I interviewed him in 1974), he described Moby-Dick as a comedy and the narrator Ishmael as a comedian. Too often Melville is typecast as a stern Calvinist prophet in the mold of Father Mapple, but he could be raunchy (see “The Cassock”), witty and playful. See another poem unpublished during his lifetime, “Montaigne and His Kitten,” in which the Frenchman talks collegially to his cat, as in:

“Superfluous business still we shun;

And ambition we let go,

The while poor dizzards strain and strive,

Rave and slave, drudge and drive,

Chasing ever, to and fro,

After ends that seldom gain

Scant exemption from life’s pain.”

The poem recalls one of Montaigne’s best-known passages, from “An Apology for Raymond Sebond” (trans. Donald Frame): “When I am playing with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me?”