Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land
This title of the poem pretty much gives away its topic, but offers little indication of enormous complexity, much less its massive length. Within almost 18,000 lines, “Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land” bursts with symbolism. Among the most significant is Ruth who appears wearing a “snowy robe” and thus becomes a vital representation of purity and innocence. A palm establishes a strong link back to Moby-Dick as a symbol with a meaning that is dependent upon the perception of the person relating to it; for instance, the character of Rolfe see the palm as a symbol of lost paradise that connects to the Garden of Eden through his own memories of Polynesia. A Greek pilot named Agath is personified as a symbol of persevering despite overwhelming suffering as a kind of contemporary Job figure.
John Brown
In the prefatory poem to Battle-Pieces, Melville’s collection of verse dedicated to Civil War topics, abolitionist is invested with the metaphorical symbolism of a meteor that shoots briefly but brightly across the sky and is endowed with meaning as a harbinger of doom. The poem’s title indicates the significance of this symbolic status, “The Portent” and lends that status greater depth by portraying Brown a corpse swinging from the gallows after his hanging by Virginia slave-owners.
The Berg
In John Marr and Other Sailors, Melville constructs another poem that seems logically connected to Moby-Dick. The poem—subtitled “A Dream”—is a first person account by an unidentified narrator of witnessing a ship that appears to have been purposely steered directly into a mammoth iceberg with the expected results being the instant sinking and loss of life. The narrator himself occupies the same distanced, unemotional concern for the ship and its crew as the iceberg itself. The bulk of the poem details what damage the berg did not suffer while mentioning the cost to human life only in terms relative to the iceberg’s obliviousness. The symbolism of a large, powerful and utterly white piece of nature acting of its own accord without regarding to seeming madness of a captain purposely driving his vessel into it has obvious parallels to Ahab’s mad pursuit of the white whale.
"Monody"
The unidentified man addressed in the opening line of this poem from the collection Timoleon
“To have known him, to have loved him”
is often thought to be a symbol for Melville’s close friend and most ardent literary supporter, Nathanael Hawthorne. The verse was written after the final time the two men saw each other and Melville wrote later that it was perhaps the happiest of reunions. Along with the poem’s title—a poem written as a lament for death—the circumstances of that last meeting has led scholars to conclude that the poem is Melville’s final word on the relationship. Imagery of estrangement, death setting his seal, winter and a houseless hermit’s mound all seem to confirm this symbolism.
The Northern Lights
The poem “Aurora-Borealis” in Battle-Pieces carries the telling subtitle “Commemorative of the Dissolution of the Armies at the Peace, May, 1865.” The dance of the Northern Lights is described using imagery like “retreating and advancing” and “decreeing and commanding” to endow the astronomical play of lights as symbols of soldiers on a battlefield given the order to disband following victory.
