So much alliteration in the grander passages of Melville that it gets to sounding like Beowulf by way of Shakespeare. E.g.:
During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve...
...Meantime, the crew driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail..."It sure sounds like he's making intentional use of archaic language and meter here to suggest ancient epic, but -- and maybe Alan H. can help us here -- was the really old Beowulf stuff already being dusted off in the 1840s? Or did all this come to Melville by way of later intermediaries like Shakespeare? Any other thoughts about literary precedents he would have known and respected? Posted by Martha Bridegam at November 22, 2005 11:33 PM
I don't see why Melville wouldn't know Beowulf, but of course I don't know.
As for alliteration and fooling with Old English meter, Gerard Manley Hopkins made that his specialty, and he was around about the same time as HM was. Other poets experimented with it as well from time to time.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at November 23, 2005 09:48 AMThis one seems like a good example:
The Sea and the Skylark
ON ear and ear two noises too old to end
Trench—right, the tide that ramps against the shore;
With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar,
Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.
Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none ’s to spill nor spend.
How these two shame this shallow and frail town!
How ring right out our sordid turbid time,
Being pure! We, life’s pride and cared-for crown,
Have lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime:
Our make and making break, are breaking, down
To man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime.
Thanks for these. That's a bracing poem.
By way of having just watched the full "Lord of the Rings" cycle on DVD (with resulting neo-Wagner overload): does anyone think Tolkien's inventions of Saruman and Shadowfax owe anything to Melville's meditation on the ambiguous significance of the color white?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at November 26, 2005 05:30 PMI doubt it, as Tolkien wrote that he rarely read anything that post-dated the Middle English period, though I gather that he was an avid sci-fi fan.
Please do post the chapter it can be found in for those of us who spent Thanksgiving someplace other than the deck of the Pequod.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 29, 2005 12:15 AMThat would be Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale."
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at November 29, 2005 04:42 PM