Chapter 6

Why then, with all these virtues of thought, is Clarel necessarily Melville’s most neglected book? The capital difficulty, I think, is inherent in its very conception as a narrative poem: it is impossible to carry through so many pages the quick sympathies and empathies that it is in the nature of verse to give. Wordsworth probably had as much skill in blank verse as any one since Shakespeare, and he was unable to avoid long waste tracts in his lengthy philosophic and biographic poems. Blake and Whitman, with a surer instinct, developed polyphonic cadences for their long poems, and this is the only tolerable alternative, I think, at least in English, to the immeasurable variety of prose itself. Melville’s eight-syllabled lines in Clarel are monotonous, vary the rhyme scheme as he will; they are made even more tedious by the stale poetic airs that accompanied it. Melville’s aloofness and spiritual independence, which cut him off from his own contemporaries, not merely saved him from their errors and superstitions: it also prevented him from profiting by their genuine advances. With the exception of Whitman and Emily Dickinson, scarcely any of Melville’s contemporaries had participated in that great refreshment of poetic language, by the fuller use of the vernacular, by discarding the powdered wig of “poetic diction,” and by the use of direct and simple word order, that had been made possible by Wordsworth’s propaganda and example. In his lesser poems Emerson sinned in this respect almost as much as the poetasters around him; and Poe’s “tarns” and Nycean barks of yore and his seraphim were typical of the exaggerations and clichés that afflicted the American poets of his time.

In the verses of his later years, Melville largely escaped from this fashionable prison; but in Clarel he was too frequently the victim of his uncertain taste. He tags adjectives on to nouns to eke out the line; he uses, all too frequently, words like fane and sward and rue and twain and nigh, and, with unforgivable recurrence, he rhymes elf and self; above all, not relying on his ear for more subtle quantities, he fills out lines with redundant words or phrases—or clips them off. This clumsiness in detail adds to the clumsiness of conception: what might have been vivid prose became dull verse: what might have been good Borrow became bad Rogers. Mid all this poetizing there remains, of course, a little poetry: lines that lift out of the grey pages like a sudden sea gull from the monotonous surface of the ocean: there are even whole passages, in particular the Dirge that comes toward the end, which are veritably moving. But although the materials for intense feeling or vivid imagism are present, they are spoiled in the mixing. All this acute observation of men, things, places, seems to clog Melville’s spirit: when he achieves victory, it is a victory of thought: an idea becomes pregnant and a dozen good lines are born. But the detail over-rides the general impression, as the ingenuity of the Hindu craftsman over-rides the total effect of his wood-carving: the movement is slow: the aim is dispersed. There is a story and a climax in Clarel; but we do not feel them in passage. We miss the poignance of Ruth’s death, by having forgotten her entirely.

It is unfortunate that Melville diverted into the ingenuities of a foreign versification the energies that should have gone into mastery of the theme itself. But matter and manner are always one; and because Melville did not find harmonious form for his intuitions, we are deprived of a good part of them, and those that remain we must pick, like precious shards, from the refuse heap of the poem. He was a true poet; but formal verse was not his medium; and the relentless probity of his mind, the keen reaching into the heart of a dilemma, lacked in these lengthy verses an appropriate vehicle. Melville was wrong when he thought that some of the aroma might have exhaled during the years Clarel remained unpublished: the aroma had never been there.