'Who Reaches Shakspeare’s Core'

A postwar addition to Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War: Civil War Poems (1866) is “The Coming Storm”: 

“All feeling hearts must feel for him

Who felt this picture. Presage dim--

Dim inklings from the shadowy sphere

Fixed him and fascinated here.

 

“A demon-cloud like the mountain one

Burst on a spirit as mild

As this urned lake, the home of shades.

But Shakspeare’s [sic] pensive child

 

“Never the lines had lightly scanned,

Steeped in fable, steeped in fate;

The Hamlet in his heart was ’ware,

Such hearts can antedate.

 

“No utter surprise can come to him

Who reaches Shakspeare’s core;

That which we seek and shun is there--

Man’s final lore.”

 

Melville adds a helpful note: “A Picture by S.R. Gifford, and owned by E.B. / Included in the N.A. Exhibition, April, 1865.” Gifford is the American painter Sanford Gifford, a second-generation member of the Hudson River School and a great admirer of Thomas Cole. At an exhibition shortly after the Confederate surrender and Lincoln’s assassination, Melville saw the painting by Gifford that lends its title to the poem. He learned it was owned by Edwin Booth, the most famous Shakespearean actor of the day, whose brother, John Wilkes Booth, had fatally shot the president. The first stanza refers to the painting’s owner. Gifford had painted the scene in 1863, during the war but before Lincoln’s murder, which explains Melville’s understanding of the painting and its title: “The Hamlet in his heart was ’ware, / Such hearts can antedate.” Perhaps it foretells the trials of Reconstruction and embattled restoration of the Union. Likewise, the poet suggests Gifford may have been gifted with prescience: “Dim inklings from the shadowy sphere.”

 

There’s much to admire in “The Coming Storm.” Note “feeling,” “feel” and “felt” in the first line and a half. And Melville’s punning reference to Lake George in the Adirondacks of upstate New York: “this urned lake.” Melville’s mind was suffused with Shakespeare. Without Macbeth and King Lear there would be no Moby-Dick.  

 

The late poet Helen Pinkerton accustomed me to thinking of Melville, with Dickinson, as the major American poet of the nineteenth century. Patriotism, literary and otherwise, is fine in its place but we shouldn’t let it blunt our critical standards. Most of the other American poets of that age, with the qualified exception of Longfellow, have come to look like minor figures.

 

Helen was a poet and a Melville and Civil War scholar, author of Melville’s Confidence Men and American Politics in the 1850’s (1987) and Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South (2010). Four of her dramatic monologues spoken by historical figures and collectively titled “Crossing the Pedregal” are collected in A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton 1945-2016 (Wiseblood Books, 2016). One of the poems is titled “Lemuel Shaw’s Meditation.” Shaw (1781-1861) was Melville’s father-in-law and chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He opposed slavery but was compelled by law in several cases to order the return of fugitive slaves to their owners. Pinkerton’s poem is set in 1861 between Abraham Lincoln’s election as president and the start of the war on April 12. Shaw died on March 31. The poem weaves Shaw’s affection for Melville and admiration for his books with slavery, Lincoln and the looming war (“The Coming Storm”). Here is Shaw’s first mention of Lincoln:

 

“Then I recalled a speech made years ago,

A strong lyceum speech in Illinois

By a young Western lawyer, a Whig like me,

That made my point exactly: the risk we ran

In that mob-ridden time, prelude to this,

That some mad, towering genius, seeking glory,

Through antislavery or its opposite,

Might overturn our laws, for personal fame,

Might break the Union to enhance his name.

The lawyer urged obedience to law

Till laws, if bad, as slavery’s code, be changed.”

 

The centrality of the rule of law, not mob passion, remains more pertinent than ever. Near the poem’s conclusion, Lincoln reappears, this time as president. In Helen’s telling, Shaw has read Moby-Dick:

 

“If this young lawyer—no one-idea’d Ahab

Nor coward Starbuck he – can find his way

As President, during the coming conflict

To use his war powers, citing the Union’s need

In mortal danger, for black-soldier power,

Ending the nightmare slavery has been,

Though he’ll not change our human nature’s evil,

He might permit a lessening of the wrong,

A small increase of right.”

 

Pinkerton takes her  epigraph to the poem from Chapter 132, “The Symphony,” one of Ahab’s great Lear-like rants in Moby-Dick: “Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?”

[In the prose “Supplement” Melville appended to Battle-Pieces he writes: “For the future of the freed slaves we may well be concerned; but the future of the whole country, involving the future of the blacks, urges a paramount claim upon our anxiety.”]