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Melville's Rose Poems: As They Fell
John Bryant
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory,
Volume 52, Number 4, Winter 1996, pp. 49-84 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.1996.0026
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/445960/summary
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]JOHN BRYANT
Melville's Rose Poems:
As They Fell
[O OME years ago, I found myself drawn to Melville's poems in
O manuscript and, in particular, the set of Rose Poems he left un-
published at his death. Bundled with these papers is a singular sheet, a
heavily revised list of these poems that Melville jotted to himself as he
tentatively contemplated some kind of Table of Contents. The manu-
script leaf on which these jottings appear provides a rare opportunity to
observe the workings of a creative mind. Generally speaking, we can
only infer the logic writers use in ordering their poems by speculating
upon their final printed order. Melville's list, however, shows us the
prior orderings he considered and rejected, and by tracing the various
stages of thought from one list to the next, we can gain a fuller under-
standing of the poet's thinking. The problem with this approach is that
the shuffled and reshuffled poems themselves might be reduced to their
titles only to be treated like markers on a checkerboard, and the obvi-
ous drawback is that one might lose sight of the fact that a poem's mean-
ing will vary depending upon its placement in a collection even though
the words themselves may not change. This is particularly true of Mel-
ville's Rose Poems which, although tightly composed and purposefully
ordered in their "final" presentation, were revised and repositioned up
to Melville's last days. Because we find these poems in manuscript, we
must take them not as reified counters on a shifting table of contents,
but as pulsing fluidities: alive because they were never finally placed,
never really finished.
Added to this problem of the poems' "positional meanings" was the
problem of contextualizing the event of their creation and perpetual
Arizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 4, Winter 1996
Copyright © 1996 by Arizona Board of Regents
issN 0004- 1 6 1 o50John Bryant
revision. At first I saw these materials merely as evidence of a poet tin-
kering with words, and there is no doubt of this fundamental fact.
Words are at times merely movable things. But 1 quickly recognized,
too, that here was an artist in love with his wife, in love with sexuality,
in love with a tradition of ideas reaching back to the twelfth century, in
love, too, with his lost son Malcolm. All of these factors contribute to
every move Melville considered in the creation and arrangement of his
Rose Poems. But to "get" all this, I had to write a story.]
PRELUDE
It was after eight, and Melville was at his morning tea. Downstairs at
the parlor window facing Twenty-sixth Street, he could hear rumblings
of Lizzie upstairs, setting their bedclothes in order. Tea steam fogged his
glasses, and he pushed them up on his brow to rub sleep from his eyes.
His back had a pinch somewhere; liver spots had become old friends; he
walked with a cane; and erysipelas had left him fevered, exhausted, and
annoyed by rash. He had to hurry.
The dead were all around him; he could not fail to get the hint.
Helen, his only older sister, had died two years ago; and who in the fam-
ily was left? Gansevoort was long dead; Augusta, Allan, Frances, and
captain Tom—all younger brothers and sisters—were dead. Only Cath-
erine and himself remained. The sweetest of all, his son Malcolm, was
dead, and Stanwix, too. No one should live to see so many children in
their graves. Pain is the price of longevity, but the reward of long life is
in the waiting for deliverance. Lizzie knew this silent anticipation and
had expressed it in her patience beyond any deep understanding of his
art and anxiety, in her endurance of those hardest years, in her love.
Lizzie would live forever.
A wardrobe clumped shut twice upstairs, and Herman tugged his
beard. Long and square and gray, it extended down to his chest. Beards
were no longer the fashion, as they were in the 1840s when he first let
his grow. As if to accentuate his antiquity; he now let his beard grow
longer than most. He recollected his father's father, Major Melvill, a
member of the Boston Tea Party and the subject of Oliver Wendell
Holmes' most enduring poem, "The Last Leaf." The old fogey had con-
tinued to wear long stockings and a cocked hat in the style of the Rev-
olution well into the 1800s. Now, Herman was the throwback, not toMelville's Rose Poems51 revolution, but to the old Knickerbocker days. The man, cane and all, was a sleeper waking from a drowsy past. He had no relish for empire. To those down the block rushing to make the trolley, his old beard was a symbol of loss. He combed his fingers from beneath his beard. The protruding fin- gers looked like nesting birds. How had he gotten so old? He felt like Rip Van Winkle; two more inches on the beard and he would Zoo/c like Rip Van Winkle. Once at the Bowery Theatre he and Mrs. Melville had enjoyed Joseph Jefferson's performance of the famous loafer. Jeffer- son, himself in dotage, had toured his show for over a decade. He had grown old with the part and become it. Melville recalled the staging of Rip's slow realization that his night's sleep had .been a twenty-year slumber. Jefferson coming stage left meets a bewildered passerby stage right who, baffled by Rip's incredible beard, strokes his own chin. He circles downstage around Rip in utter amazement and passes on, while Jefferson, turning his back to the audience to follow the passing man's gaze, comes round in slow ballet to face the lights. He touches his chin, finds the roots of his undetected beard, and pulls down, down, down on the fantastic growth with his eyes growing larger, larger and his mouth gaping wider until, reaching the end, he finds himself stunned, alone on stage, trying, midst the audience's warm chuckles, to make sense out of this impossible beard. In an instant, Rip's identity rushed upon Melville. He was forever out of place, out of time. In the fifties, before the war, his novels had kept pace with the times for a while. But soon enough, he outpaced his readers: Mardi, Mofry- Dick, The Confidence-Man. The sixties had been the worst of times: the war, the job, the poems that failed, the faltering marriage, then Mal- colm, sweet Mackie. By the seventies, he had given up reaching the masses, but he had still kept up his search for a voice and a reader who might listen. He was a poet now; Clare/ had proved that. And yet in the eighties his poems kept wanting to become tales again. Take "John Marr," a simple reminiscence of the days at sea. Before he had done with it, the little headnote setting the scene had become a character sketch in prose. The result was a piece that began in prose and ended in poetry. "Billy Budd" was the same: a little ditty on a hanged seaman, "Billy in the Darbies," had grown into a little novel. At times Melville felt out of place with the artist in him. He was reverting in style as he reverted back in time: back to his sailing years in "John Marr," back to
52John Bryant this grandfather's Napoleonic wars in "Billy Budd." These pieces were half history, half fiction; half prose, half poem. But he liked the mon- strous minglings of form; they grabbed him. It was as though language was evolving in form before one's eyes, as if the old transcendence from earth to something beyond nature could happen as you jump from prose to poem, from the blossom of a flower to the essence of its perfume. He heard Lizzie being quiet on the stairs. One happy difference between him and Rip was the wife. Lizzie was the sweet breath of clover, and no termagant. Every male would laugh with horror at Rip's Dame. She was the nemesis of their manly indo- lence, humor, and shady elm. She was their hell. The Dame would be up and doing while they only had world enough to practice being use- less. She was utilitarian. But this was not Lizzie. She had loved Herman. And hated him. Then loved him again. He knew the scenes of that play. She had been thrilled by his youthful vigor, his seaman youth and tanned brow, his muscles, and eyes. She had been thrilled by the celebrity of Typee, and had done her part to help him publish. She had endured his writing when the whole business had become a disease. Periodically, she would run home to Boston as if to come up for air, to escape the suffocation of his despair. She needed that. After the War, she had proposed a sepa- ration, but then something—a vestige of former love, perhaps, or a deeper fear of the shame of divorce, or perhaps a devotion to family and children—brought her back. Finally, she stayed with him; long after he deserved far less. And when Mackie had locked himself away, her re- turn to Herman was complete. He was a link to her son; that was the measure of her love. One never survives the loss of a child this way, and Herman just lived on, in die shade of her forgiveness, somehow learn- ing to write again. Lizzie was Herman's elm, then again his rose. Lizzie made her way to the kitchen. He followed from the study and joined her, placing his beard beside her cheek. He took a second cup of tea to wash away the sweetness of the first. She said, "I saw Mr. Stedman on the street from die window up- stairs." He said, "Père or fils?" "The Younger, but I don't think he shall be calling since he was out there freezing to death and chatting with someone else, I don't know who."
Melville's Rose Poems53
"Stedman does this. He talks me up to strangers. He wants me in the
Authors Club."
"Drink your tea. I want you cheery this afternoon. Anyway, you need
a club."
"Authors publish; they don't club."
"An author might try retirement. Now go."
He went. If this was petticoat government, he would not secede.
"Tomorrow is Valentine's Day," he said over his shoulder.
He went back to the study. The desk was a sizable secretary more ele-
gant than spacious, but suitable for the task of rewriting and reorganiz-
ing his poems; he was regrouping them into a collection for Lizzie. Above
the desk, tacked to the wall was a simple sheet of paper, stretched and
warped a bit by the seasons, collecting a fine layer of dust, invisible un-
less touched. On the sheet was a motto: "Keep true to the dreams of
your youth." Melville had put it up some years before, now it was a part
of the woodwork. From time to time he would glance up from his pen
intending to think a word through before erasing it, and he would catch
sight of tiie motto, but dared not read it, for that would retrieve the
pugnacious state of mind that had led him years ago to put it there in
the first place, and that might make him lose the thought, the word,
that he was attempting to grab.
He stepped to the window. Sliding himself between an armchair and
table, he pulled the lace curtain aside and looked down to the cold
bright street below. Arthur Stedman was in animated discussion with a
gentleman who hunched his back against the winter and occasionally
stamped a foot like a horse anticipating a command to move on.
Arthur was young, and Melville liked that. He reminded him of
himself. But like so many of those who actually read him—Henry S.
Salt, Clark Russell, Robert Louis Stevenson—Arthur was interested in
Typee and the lot. Melville was gratified by this resurgence and quietly
anticipated the resurrection of his fame. But he was no longer Typee.
Nor was he Ishmael. Melville's second coming, if it were to come, would
be a problem. At seventy-one, he was keeping true to the dreams of his
youth by creating poems, not novels—poems about Roses, and Lizzie
and Malcolm, and about Lilacs and Rip and Billy. But they who would
resurrect him were not interested in who he was now. They cherished
the sea-relics. Melville felt like Rip again, out of place, out of time,
even as a witness to his own return.54John Bryant The wind blew fiercely down Twenty-sixth Street, and a messenger boy, as if propelled by the wind, ran west toward Lexington and the trolley. Taking the hint, Arthur and friend moved on as well, heading with other pedestrians toward the wide arteries of the city that would take them down to Wall Street or up to Grand Central and on to Busi- ness. Melville's tea was bitter, hot and full. He clasped the cup in both hands for a bit of warmth, then put it to the window. The steam frosted one pane, and Arthur Stedman simply vanished in fog. He fogged an- other pane, and another, then the ones below; and gray Twenty-sixth Street was gone. Shape and substance were one translucency. Melville was ready to write. Today he would make a Valentine. It was February 13, 1890. Spread out before him on the desk were several packets of poems. The poems themselves were on small, odd-sized sheets of paper about five-and-a- half inches wide and almost seven inches long. Melville could get four such sheets out of a single larger sheet of foolscap; they were just the right size to fit his coat pocket. Some poems sat on a single sheet; oth- ers ran for pages. Some were in pencil, and a few were in ink of various tans, grays, and blacks. Some were even legible, which was. remarkable considering his handwriting; others were heavily edited; others still had been scissored, their clipped remnants containing a phrase or two at- tached with straight pins to other sheets. Somewhere in this mare's nest was a love note to his wife. He knew where, approximately, because he had been working on a collection dedicated "to Winnefred," a name coyly designed to conceal his wife's identity and fool no one, for about four years now. It was a book to celebrate the heat of their marriage. He guessed the little vol- ume would not be published in his life, but she was the only reader that mattered, so it made sense to get a draft to her before too long. The vol- ume was rapidly coming into shape. He thought he'd call it Weeds and Wildings. Three years before, he had assembled most of his poetry, some dating back to 1847, into a volume called Meadows and Seas. Out of this, he had pulled the nostalgic sea sketches of old mariners called "John Marr," which Putnam's had obligingly published in a run of twenty-five copies. That was for friends. The "Meadows" that remained
Melville's Rose Poems55 after Melville extracted these "Seas," were mostly flower and wood- land poems of one sort or another and he placed them in a file entitled "Clover." That was for Lizzie. Clover is a simple gift. Like Whitman's leaf of grass, it is ubiquitous and immortal, the "uncut hair of graves" and the "flag of one's disposi- tion." But it is a flower as well, a commoner, and yet a little rose. In childhood, Herman and his brother Tom would tease their sisters. Tak- ing two three-leaf clovers and removing a petal from each, they would fashion a false four-leafer in hopes of tricking them into astonishment. But on Herman's wedding day, as luck would have it, he found a true four-leaf clover and presented it to Lizzie. It augured well, and they pressed the specimen in their Bible. This .clover meant sweetness and light, a shared emblem of their hope. And while he had made much of clover in one or two poems, Melville drew away from it. Perhaps the progress of his early career, or rather lack of progress, and the trials of mid-life had made a mockery of the pastoral emblem. The auspicious flower had become an irony: the graveyard growth of his lapsed devotion to Lizzie and a flag of the un- fulfilled promise of his literary greatness. Also, Melville did not want his title to sound like Whitman's Grass. So, he had dropped "Clover" as a cover title for his collection, although he retained the poems touch- ing upon clover. These thoughts Melville kept to the back of his mind. Up front was Lizzie. He considered this one reader, her past and her emotions, what she liked, what she wanted, what she needed to feel. He thought of a little piece he had been working on for some time now. Its title was "The Chipmunk." Melville had written several little "ditties" about woodland creatures: blue bird, butterfly, robin, "chipmunk, mouse, and mole." What would Stedman think of the Romancer of Great Whales writing about such wee things? If one is to make a great book, one must choose a great subject, Melville had once said, and Moby-Dick breached forth. Now chipmunks? But each ditty had its stamp of truth: there was sin in that butterfly, death beside the mouse and mole. Melville was investigating more precise moments of being, tiny and fleeting, only recognizable by those who had shared the moment. For most, "The Chipmunk" would be too precious—for Lizzie, not precious enough. It was a concealed lament for their son. Most would find here only a poet's puzzlement over the evanescence of life. But for Lizzie
56John Bryant
there would be more: the personal scar, the agony of a boy's suicide. Her
boy. Theirs.
It had been the year of Herman and Lizzie's falling out. 1867. He had
been too often in rage over the final collapse of his career. Drunk at
times. She had wanted out. Her minister, the eminent Reverend Henry
Whitney Bellows, had even sanctioned her escape back to Boston.
Somehow they had patched it up. But the repressed tension, like some
river under the porch, waited for Mackie, their firstborn son, who in his
tunnel-vision teens came home late one night without a key, without a
father who cared for him, or his mother, or their family. And so, when
let in after persistent knocking, Mackie went to bed and put a bullet in
his head. To make them listen, to make them love again, to make them
cry forever. Mackie.
Melville blinked hard to erase the sight of his son's bruised temple.
"Keep true to the dreams of your youth." He could not let his Youth die
even though his young son had killed himself. And so he had worked to
bury the pain. Like an acorn dispersed by woodland creatures to a place
where, forgotten, it might grow.
What Melville had done over the years with "The Chipmunk" was
still fresh in his mind. Even now he was still tinkering. He had some
time ago selected a discarded sheet of paper on which he had, even
longer ago, written to himself a few words: "The sweetness even one
with the light." He had turned that sweet sheet over and copied there
the bulk of "The Chipmunk." He had labored over the lines on pages
long since thrown away. The polished page before him was—and he
smiled to think it—still trying to be a final version.
Stock-still I stand,
And [him] I see
Prying, peeping
From Beech Tree,
Crickling, crackling
Gleefully!
But, affrighted
By [some] sound,
Presto! vanish—
Whither bound?Melville's Rose Poems57
So did Baby,
Crowing mirth,
E'en as startled
By some inkling
Touching Earth,
Flit (and whither?)
From [the] hearth!
The little ditty now seemed to say so little. Our chipmunk is a gay
denizen of the woods, a representative of "mirth" or the unconscious
joy of life and, by extension, our own youth. But "some sound" frightens
it, and the point is clear. "Some inkling" of death banishes mirth and
youth; they flit from our mind like a nervy chipmunk. Melville remem-
bered his former satisfaction with this modest creation. He noted, how-
ever, that he had put double brackets to the left of the third stanza, a
reminder that he was still uncertain about its inclusion, or rather am-
bivalent about the expansion it makes into the personal tragedy of his
son. Baby. His options were clear. He could retain the second stanza
and drop the third, and the result would be an innocuous description of
a woodland creature so benign as to be offensive. Or he could drop the
second and keep the third, thus making the chipmunk/Malcolm con-
nection explicit. The result would be the opening of a wound, the res-
urrection of great pain, the voicing of bafflement. He followed the
route of truth and included both. Using a pair of grand parentheses
connecting the second stanza to the first, he closed up the blank space
between t_he two stanzas making them one. This effectively created a
two-stanza poem.
He would no longer hide his Malcolm. Leaning his cheek into the
cup of his hand, he underlined the word "him" in the poem's second
line. He tinkered more. "Some sound" and "some inkling": when these
were alternate wordings, there had been no problem. Now together in a
single poem their repetition, even though lines apart, startled Melville
with their dullness. He changed "some sound" to "wee sound" and felt
a satisfaction over the vague connection the Scottish "wee" created
with the name of his dead son. And then, he noticed in the last line an
equivocation he had made before. Initially, he had written "our hearth,"
but an earlier automatic impulse to bury the fact that this Baby was58John Bryant
"ours"—his and Lizzie's—had led him to replace "our" with "the." "The
hearth." Now was a time for resolution and the undoing of old equivo-
cations. He added two dots below the stricken "our" restoring it back
again. "Our hearth."
The manuscript before him still posed problems. Almost from the
beginning, he had decided to find a proper place for "The Chipmunk"
in his Clover volume, but to do so he had had to fix the event in time
so that it would follow in sequence with other poems tied to particular
seasons. Autumn had seemed right for a Chipmunk to flit about, and
sometime recently he had composed eight more lines to insert at the
beginning, to invoke the fall. On a separate clean sheet, he had written
two new stanzas:
Heart of autumn!
Weather meet,
Like to sherbert
Cool and sweet,
The woods shed fluttering
From calm eaves
Sun-lit, sun-dyed
Golden leaves.
And he had attached this sheet with a straight pin to his poem. Au-
tumn as sherbert cool and sweet: the image recalls Keats' "season of mists
and mellow fruitfulness," and yet Melville's sweet coolness tastes like
the dead of winter. It was an image familiar enough, yet original, and
Melville had been pleased. He had kept it, even underlined it, as if the
italics would provide a temporal and philosophical signpost for the
more wintry poems to come in his collection for Lizzie.
But in flipping from sheet to sheet, Melville determined that the sec-
ond image of fluttering woods had to go, and this he had somehow also
known from the beginning. Its simple message—the leaves golden are
falling—was not worth the space it occupied. The predictable colors
take away from the startling taste of autumn. But the real problem was
that the rhymed conceit of "calm eaves" and "golden leaves" sounded
familiar. For over fifty years he had stored away words. He had written
thousands of his own words. In what book, upon what shelf in the li-
brary of his mind, was this too-familiar rhyme? He did not want theMelville's Rose Poems59
echo of someone else's poems resounding in his woodland scene, or if
that echo had to be, he wanted to know its source.
Half in relief and half in despair for his aging head, he acknowledged
that the words had been his own, freshly composed not too long before
in another wee-creature poem called "The Little Good Fellows." Set in
late summer, this other ditty opens with the robin "roving" in the or-
chards and calling us to welcome the fruits of nature. It was in the sec-
ond stanza that he found the source of his worry:
Love for love. For ever we
When some [self-slayer sad] we see
Moundless under forest-eaves,
Cover him and buds and leaves;
And charge the chipmunk, mouse, and mole—
Molest not this poor human soul!
Noting the "forest-eaves/buds and leaves" rhyme, Melville soon enough
realized that in writing his other "eaves/leaves" lines for "The Chip-
munk," he plagiarized from his own "Little Good Fellows," a poem he
had derived from John Webster's play The White Devil.
Placing the two manuscripts before him, he had struck out die new
second stanza of "The Chipmunk" with its eaves of golden leaves, and
that would eliminate the dull repetition of the same rhyme in "The Lit-
tle Good Fellows." But more had been sparked, and suddenly the signif-
icance of what "The Chipmunk" was really about rushed back to him in
confirmation of his resolve to memorialize Malcolm. In "Little Good
Fellows" the roving robin, a symbol of love, discloses death, and be-
neath the stolen forest eaves and leaves is a body of some unrequited
lover who, seeking solace in the woods, has taken his life. Nature's de-
cay and carrion feeders shall not molest this disillusioned "self-slayer
sad." Or should not, and the deeper message of this ditty is that our fi-
nal delusion is in thinking there is ever solace in the woods. The senti-
mental and precious tone is ironic, even mocking.
But the mind has ravines that can channel secret streams into unan-
ticipated pools. Melville had placed double brackets, the same as those
in "The Chipmunk" at the beginning of each stanza of "The Little
Good Fellows." Here, too, he was still unsure about which stanza was in
fact the poem itself. Somehow, "The Chipmunk" and "The Little Good
Fellows" were the same poem, the products of a deep impulse trying to6oJohn Bryant
reach articulation. Melville did not recall precisely when or how he
came to see Malcolm in all of this. At first he had written of this "self-
slayer" in "The Little Good Fellows" without fully recognizing his son.
Embedded in this routine message about nature was a heretofore unac-
knowledged link to Mackie. Not all suicides are the same; Melville had
witnessed several at sea and in town. He had spoken of self-annihila-
tion to Hawthorne: not all hints of self-slaying meant Malcolm. The
body there is just some "friendless . . . unburied" man, like in die Web-
ster play. But now he saw. The body was his boy.
Malcolm had shot himself on the morning of September n, 1867,
upstairs where Lizzie just now, twenty-three years later, had been put-
tering. But if Malcolm had taken his life in September, he belonged
in an autumn, not a summer, poem. Melville set about to conceal the
body of his son in "The Little Good Fellows." He exhumed him, chang-
ing his "self-slayer sad" back to the more general phrasing from Web-
ster—"unfriended man"—so that he could all the better re-bury that
body as "Baby" in "The Chipmunk." Our Baby.
So, the "eaves/leaves" rhyme had led Melville back to one poem
which led him on the rebound back to "The Chipmunk," but this time
with a deeper relevance. Striking self-slayer Malcolm out of the one
poem gave more energy to the lost child in the other. "The Chipmunk"
had new life, at the expense of "The Little Good Fellows." It read as
follows:
Heart of autumn!
Weather meet,
Like to sherbert
Cool and sweet.
Stock-still I stand,
And him I see
Prying, peeping
From Beech Tree,
Crickling, crackling
Gleefully!
But, affrighted
By wee sound,
Presto! vanish—
Whither bound?Melville's Rose Poems61
So did Baby,
Crowing mirth,
E'en as startled
By some inkling
Touching Earth,
Flit (and whither?)
From our hearth!
The changes were slight, but Melville knew he had altered the personal
significance of the poem radically. Baby, Capital B, having crowed
with mirth, has flitted off now like the startled chipmunk. Baby was
Malcolm, who had come crowing into the world—or so Herman, the
proud new father, had put. it to his brother on the day of the lad's birth
back in 1849. And it was Malcolm who had left, who knows why.
Changing "the hearth" to "our hearth" personalized the little poem
even more for a reader such as Lizzie, the mother of Baby and the self-
slayer sad.
Born on February 16, Malcolm had been a Valentine child. In three
days, he would have been forty-one. Not a baby but still a son. Could
Melville wrap in tissue and ribbon this newly revised poem with its
concealed subject and send it to Lizzie for a valentine? It seemed right
in a ghastly way, but totally inappropriate. Could he on a day for Love
inflict upon another a remembrance of a child born to die, a memento
mori so deeply personal, tragic, incomprehensible? And yet, does not
the poem exorcise the remorse that makes love seem fleeting?
Melville would sit beside his wife and hand her the poem. She would
read and begin softly to cry, her eyebrows knitting as if to slowly wring
out welling tears. His eyes would redden as she released her frame from
its correct Boston posture and let it fall gently a few inches into a
cradling arm, her head to his chest, her hair in his beard. She would cry
for Mackie, and he, too. His revisions had transformed his own hurt
into words; that was the blessing of his talent, to channel pain onto pa-
per, to get it out. Lizzie had no such avenue, but in reading the words,
she could make her hurt come free. After the words and the tears would
come release. Art, the great release, would help Lizzie out. And Her-
man. For a while.
But there is no lift in such a release, no gathering of thought beyond
the passionate articulation of anxiety. Melville dismissed the idea as02John Bryant
soon as it had entered his mind. It occurred to him, too, that "The
Chipmunk" and its companion "The Little Good Fellows," as good as
they were, were just wee and precious enough to be printed on some
pasteboard card and purchased as a notion. He knew they were better
than that, but this Valentine's Day required more than sentiment. He
knew that he was far from preparing a final draft of the poems he called
"Clover" or "Weeds and Wildings," or whatever they were to be called.
He put aside the two ditties, buried them like nuts in the forest floor,
and turned to his Roses.
Il
Melville had a good notion of what poems would go where in his
collection, and that it would consist of four major sections. First would
come a cycle of poems running from Spring to Christmas called "The
Year," which would reminisce about Arrowhead. This was where "The
Little Good Fellows" and "The Chipmunk" would go. Next was a mis-
cellany of "This, That, and the Other," poems on thought, art, and
growth far more serious than their rag-tag grouping might suggest. Part
Three was "Rip Van Winkle's Lilac"—and here was a problem. This
poem needed to evolve. But already it had required a headnote which,
like "John Marr," had grown into a brief character sketch. And more,
that brief sketch was becoming a tale, like "Billy Budd." Writing it out
was the only way for Melville to discover who his Rip really was and
what he meant. And this would take time. Part Four, however, was die
perfect extract for a love note. Entitled "A Rose or Two," it consisted
of two sections: a group of short poems, called "As They Fell," and an
amusing allegorical narrative on art called "The Rose Farmer," to which
was appended a stylish coda or "L'Envoi." These were love poems: hot,
and transcendent, all centrally focused on the image of the Rose. Each
was tight in line; tight, too, in the curbed intensity of its passion.
These were deeply sensual poems of sexual love, the entwined cou-
plings of rose and cross, die fusions of frost and flame. They were poems
that also confronted the dust of passion, the failure of idealism, and the
fateful blessed priority of substance over essence. They were poems of
transfiguration and resurrection, the hope of finding essence within
matter. All of these were contained within die poetic bloom and attar
of the rose. These Rose Poems, called "As They Fell," also honoredMelville's Rose Poems63 Lizzie. She was the rose queen, and these were the hearts that would be Melville's valentine. Melville cherished his love poems because they made him forget he was seventy-one. They were as lusty as the troubadour Drouon who sings "The Devotion of the Flowers to Their Lady," the last of the poems in the group, and yet as spiritually self-contained as the monk that troubadour becomes in old age. To combine spiritual impulses, Melville accepted the symbol of the rose that goes back to the twelfth century when the waning of feudalism gave birth to the nostalgia and romanticism of the courtly tradition. It was from this age of sacred and secular fusings that the rose—that thorny perennial shooting up blooms of exceptional beauty from dry stumps, interlayered petals like the sup- plicant's hands or unmade satin sheets—grew to represent the promise of spiritual transcendence through the heightened emotions of love. The Virgin Mary wore a rose, as did her cathedral windows. But there was also a personal reason for Melville's fascination with these details. He loved flowers. The complication was that, while Lizzie loved them too, she suffered from what she called "rose fever"; she had allergies bad enough to send her racing, each spring and summer, home to Boston where apparently the pollen was more agreeable. Besides, the respite from Herman did her good. But by the 1880s Lizzie had deter- mined that her "rose fever" was in fact "hay fever," and she gave Her- man permission to plant a garden behind the house. He did, and as he planted his roses, and watered them, and removed the aphids, and pruned the stems, he diought through his rose poems and planned one day to make a gift of them for Lizzie, a recompense for allowing him a garden, a recompense for enduring the decades with a writer, a recom- pense, somehow, for Mackie. The poems would not be about whales or mariners; they would be about her. And Lizzie was his art. She had never been much of a subject in his writing, nor had male-female bonding been a recurrent focus, nor had wives figured much in his work. But Melville knew that Lizzie's pres- ence had allowed his art to be. Her return on the investment was to be married to a literary failure. That thorn still hurt. And to make a rec- ompense again, he would fashion his rose poems to be poems about the struggle to write as well as to love. Lizzie—his Eve, his Mary, his lady— Lizzie would be the rosy symbol of his art. He could not say thanks, pay tribute, do her honor in any other way than to write these poems.
64John Bryant
Now, coming to the end, Melville also sensed diat "As They Fell"
could resolve his decades-long debate over the nature of art. Was art
designed to articulate otherwise unspoken, unspeakable, self-slaying
truths about our deepest sense of being; or was it there to contain those
trudis in a form that would reach readers? Should art expose the rocky
essence of our existence, or should it approximate, even re-create beauty?
Was art a function of philosophy and metaphysics; was it purely aes-
dietics and joy? Was it the distilled oil and perfumed attar of rose; or
was it the corporeal bloom1. This, too, was in his packet of poems for
Lizzie.
But arranging the poems properly would not be easy.
Ill
Melville drew the file called "As They Fell" toward his stomach. In it
were a dozen poems, each well along in composition and about as com-
plete as he would ever hope to get them. The task was not to revise, but
to put them in order. With "The Year" poems, the ordering was simple:
diey followed the seasons from Spring to Christmas. Some of his rose
poems such as "Amoroso" and "Under the Snow" had seasonal associa-
tions, but others, such as "Four Beads from a Rosary," had no temporal
placement at all, and required none. He could easily enough organize
these dozen poems to begin with roses in winter and end with some-
diing Springish, and that would bring the entire Clover collection full
circle back to the feeling of Spring that begins "The Year." And from
the time he first considered this book of poems, he had placed one
poem, "The Devotion of the Flowers to Their Lady," last. It was forty
lines or so, and was about love, springtime, and resurrection. But like
"Devotion," die other poems transcended time, and Melville did not
feel obliged to harness them to a seasonal arrangement simply because
diey would then complement the ordering of his opening poems.
Sometimes one had to avoid perfection.
So for months now, Melville had been shuffling the poem leaves
endlessly, reading them over yet again, testing the sound and feel of each
as it resonated widi its new neighbor. He would put his Rosary poems
(four little prayers) toward die end as if to prepare for "The Devotion,"
his blockbuster conclusion; dien he would switch them upstairs to the
beginning as if to introduce the whole little grouping of twelve. ThenMelville's Rose Poems65
he would switch them back. Some poems would not fit anywhere. He
loved "To a Friend"; it had the ring of truth, but was fated to go—after
all, it was not about roses. But not wanting to be too quick, Melville
had let it stay for months before rejecting it entirely. He had dropped
others only to restore them and drop them again. It was a glorious mess.
And though he was very close now to the right ordering, and very sure
of its Tightness, his frustration in all the reshuffling was voiced in the ti-
tle, "As They Fell." It was as though he could do no better than to toss
the file up the staircase, let each poem land where it may, and publish
them in the random order in which he retrieved them. Lizzie could read
them as they fell.
Melville appreciated this whim but also knew, almost the second he
had decided upon the title, that the angel Lucifer had fallen, Adam and
Eve had fallen, man had fallen, and in a mental process so immediate as
to be instinct, he knew that the inevitable fall into awareness was at
the heart of human existence. The reasoning was compelling. Love is a
desire. Desire is a want. We want because we shall die; we want perpe-
tuity. Our sense of divinity grows in response to this want of ideality;
thus, our desire is a symptom of consciousness. Love is also redemption,
both an act of fulfillment and an escape from desire itself. We sense that
the paradise from which we have fallen may be regained, that our
emptiness may be filled with the desire that makes us empty. Melville's
Rose Poems are about want. They are the meditations of Adam and
Eve, men and women, Herman and Lizzie, meditations made as they
fall into desire. Hence, "As They Fell."
Hence, too, the need to make "The Devotion of the Flowers to
Their Lady" the bedrock of his collection, for it is about Paradise Re-
gained not through asceticism, deprivation, and shame, but as Dante
beholding Beatrice would have it, through beauty and the rose. Thus,
the poem begins:
O Queen, we are loyal: shall sad ones forget?
We are natives of Eden—
Sharing its memory widi you,
and your handmaidens yet.
Speaking here are the common flowers, the ladies-in-waiting of the
Rose. They proclaim their loyalty because others, certain "musing mor-
tals" in the next stanza, mutter sarcastically of the Rose's festive looks.66John Bryant
How can exiles of Eden, forced now to endure the consequences of our
fall into mortality, "Old age, decay, and the sorrows," exhilarate in die
"memory" of paradise when the reality of that fall "devours" us? How
can there be Joy? The flowers continue:
They marvel and marvel how came you so bright,
Whence the splendor, the joyance—
Florid revel of joyance,
the Cypress in sight!
The Rose Queen refuses to "upbraid" Adam whose "fall/Like a land-
slide by waters/Rolled an out-spreading impulse/disordering all"; nor
does she castigate the Angel who cast Adam and Eve out of their nup-
tials; nor will she "languish" as do her ladies "with secret desire/for the
garden of God." She prizes her "florid revel."
Melville could not explain the source of his queen's "joyance": it
simply is. But just as our desire for God somehow certifies the necessary
existence of something beyond this simple, inexplicable joy, the beauty
of the rose, signifies—surely as a presence, not a lacking, it must sig-
nify—the possibility of redemption. Some hint of the rose's "joyance"
comes upon these common flowers and "freshens" them when the earth's
own joyance, Springtime, "Touches, and coronates" the queen. This
exile called life has its term; it will end. But the very evidence of na-
ture's spring breath verifies the reality of paradise. The poem ends:
Breathing, O daughter of far descent,
Banished, yet blessed in banishment,
Whereto is appointed a term;
Flower, voucher of Paradise, visible pledge,
Rose, attesting it spite of the Worm.
Earlier on, Melville had put a colon after "Worm," and had rattled on
some more. But the stanza was too long. He scissored off the excess
after the colon, put a period to what remained, and clipped it with a pin
to the rest of the poem.
The patchwork was probably not quite ready to be copied. But it was
ready enough for Lizzie to see herself in it. She was his joyance, his
flower, his voucher of Paradise. One doubt persisted, though. Would
she see immediately that it was he, not simply the handmaiden flowers-
in-waiting, voicing his devotion? To preempt any possible confusion,Melville's Rose Poems67
he had added a clever headnote attributing his poem's composition to a
certain, fictitious Clement Drouon, once a troubadour now "retiring
from the gay circles . . . and ultimatly dsappearing [sic] from the world
in a monastery." Melville liked the self-portrait—lover, singer, recluse—
and his identity in it would be clear, to Lizzie at any rate. He snorted at
the double misspelling of "ultimatly dsappearing" in the headnote and
confidently corrected it to "ultimatly diappearing" [sic]. Spelling had
never been his forte.
"The Devotion of the Flowers" is where he wanted his valentine to
end, and it was toward this citadel that he wanted the other poems to
march. He had attempted many times already to build up the right se-
quence of poems, and had concluded with as much resolution as he
dared that three of the remaining eleven poems were obvious, immedi-
ate precursors: "Rose Window," "Four Beads from a Rosary," and a me-
dieval poem "Chateau Rose" ("medieval" we assume, for the text is lost
and only the title remains to suggest its content).
Melville grabbed the "Rose Window" poem to savor it once again;
he never tired of reading it. One of his best, it speaks less of Eve and res-
urrection than of the power of faith, beauty, art, and the rose to trans-
figure matter into spirit. The setting is in a church. In fact, that was the
poem's earliest title: "In Church." The church is cathedral-sized, not
unlike Reverend Bellows' Unitarian pile uptown where Herman and
Lizzie rented a pew. As the preacher delivers a "honied homily" of death
and Jesus (the Rose of Sharon), Melville drowses. As if in a vision out
of Chaucer or Boethius, he sees an Angel holding up a Rose like a lamp
which illuminates the shrouds of the dead, transforming their pale as-
pect into "plaids and chequered tartans red."
Melville adjusted his glasses and read on to the last stanza out of four.
In his poem, he wakes, but his allegorical dream replays in reality, with
light, not Angels, assuming the action:
I woke. The great Rose-Window high,
A mullioned wheel in gable set,
Suffused with rich and soft in dye
Where Iris and Aurora met;
Aslant in sheaf of rays it threw
From all its foliate round of panes
Transfiguring light on dingy stains,
While danced the motes in dusty pew.68John Bryant
Melville saw a world of meaning contained in the medieval rose win-
dow. Emblem of a heliocentric, god-centered world, of Mary, mother of
Christ, lovely bearer of the savior, mediator of God for man. Emblem,
too, of the rose itself with central core and radiating petals pointing
inward, this architectural splendor does more than transmit light: it
transforms an inscrutable energy into visible, usable, palpable color.
Death dancing dust there is, indeed; and pure light exposes it harshly.
But the rose window transfigures deatii into lively color. Its varied spec-
tra define matter, startle it to life, reveal hope. It loosens the spirit en-
cased within the blinding power of light's repressive colorlessness. Like
motes of dust, we dance up to die color. Here then is life—not in "dingy
stains" but in the dance of light, in the transforming and transfiguring
power of the window, in the rose, in Art.
Set side by side on the desk, "Rose Window" and "The Devotion"
seemed like brass markers placed upon a cathedral floor, the bas-relief
replicas of the souls buried below, ready for tourists to rub: husband to
the left, wife to the right. Herman there with his window; Lizzie here
with her flowers-in-waiting. Side by side forever, but separate and dis-
tinct personalities. These were not two flames poised to make one; Mel-
ville would not fool himself to accept that sentiment. Nor would Lizzie.
They were separate souls. But they shared more than the dust and stains
of old age, decay, and sorrow. He had his dance of words, transforming
life; she had life and Springtime together, Joy. He art; she nature. And
touching both joy and dance was something uniquely theirs. Call it
"joy-ance."
Melville placed one poem atop the other, then to give each a bit of
space, he inserted "Four Beads" and "Rose Chateau" between them.
The first of the "Four Beads on a Rosary," a few lines called "A Charm
in Life," took too long to say something Melville was not sure was
worth saying: that one should worship white roses, not gaudy tulips,
"for theirs are Christ's sweetness and light." The sentiment did not
quite fit with the praise of color in "Rose Window." And compared
to the tliree pidiier, more truly beadlike poems that followed, it seemed
to weaken the overall impact. This was a problem he would tend to
later.
Melville knew diat "As They Fell" was a puzzle whose pieces might
fit in various, equally acceptable ways. But one way had to feel better
than the others. Placing the transfiguring and resurrection poems lastMelville's Rose Poems69
was comfortable. In ordering the others, he needed tensions, one poem
against another, that would compel readers to the resolvent end. If one
is to believe in the chance of resurrection and transfiguration of the
spirit, one must believe too in the transcendent power of matter by
which the spirit is perceived. Flesh and essence must have an equal
lure. He would start then with something sensual, something hot.
Amoroso: the loving one, male. Not a lust-lover, for there is a rose in-
side this hot Italian. Amoroso. The word was rich in sound; Melville
loved to murmur it: Am a Rose, Am Morose. It was rich in meaning,
accentuating the union of matter and spirit: Amore and Rose. He had
used the word to title an opening poem, "Amoroso":
Rosamond, my Rosamond
Of roses is the rose;
Her bloom belongs to summer,
Nor less in winter glows,
When, mossed in furs all cosey,
We speed it o'er the snows
By ice-bound streams enchanted,
While red Arcturus, he
A huntsman ever ruddy,
Sees a ruddier star by me.
O Rosamond, Rose Rosamond,
Is yonder Dian's reign?
Look, the icicles despond
Chill drooping from the fane!
But Rosamond, Rose Rosamond,
In us, a plighted pair,
Frost makes with flame a bond,—
One purity they share.
To feel your cheek like ice,
While snug the furs inclose—
This is a spousal love's device,
This is Arctic Paradise,
And [sparking] in the snows!
Rosamond, my Rosamond,
Rose Rosamond, Moss-Rose!70John Bryant This was a valentine unto itself. Melville could feel its heat in the con- trasting image of cold. He had rarely before been so sexually explicit: the bonding of frost and flame, the "sparking in the snows," is the amorous huntsman's undoing of his lady's chill. The rose packed in furs is as arresting an image of the female sexual organ as is the melting de- tumescence of the phallic icicle. The union of female frost and male flame into one purity is a tense, sexual Paradise, arctic yet snug, but all the same validated as "spousal," not illicit, love. Prefiguring the Mil- tonic paradise called forth in "The Devotion," this Eden of fire and ice, like the sonorities and cadences of the lines, is purely sensual. Al- though the cold might hint at feminine frigidity, it is in fact only figu- rative, a lack of heat that compels heat into existence. Frost and flame do not merely unite; they define each other. Cold is unknowable with- out its opposite. Male is meaningless without mate. The rose in "Amoroso" was real: corporeal and carnal. It was not a symbol of transfiguration or of resurrection. This bloom was the stuff of sex and longing. But matter has its "term"; it dies. And while science and Whitman tell us the happy news that matter cannot be destroyed but is transformed into new states, there was no consolation for Mel- ville in the inexplicable failure of one's consciousness to share in such transformations once the flesh decays. One's memory does not follow life's ceaseless cycle. It ends with death. Even the rose must die. To en- hance this contrast of transfiguration and resurrection, Melville had already composed two conflictual poems on the vanity of outrunning death. Without such tension there could be no real youth or honesty in this valentine. The Romans had a funeral rite in which mourners would collect their tears in one communal vial, a lachrymatory, to present to the be- reaved and then entomb with the deceased. Very touching. Very silly. Melville had used this device in his principal poem of conflict, but since his subject was roses, he translated the Lachrymatory into the lan- guage of flowers. The title he had decided upon was "The Vial of At- tar." Attar is not the tearful dew trapped in the petals of a rose; it is the essence of the rose itself, an oil squeezed from the petals for perfume. To translate further to the logic of roses: if the bloom is flesh, the attar is spirit, a fragrance of God. Melville pulled "The Vial of Attar" before him. It was a short piece but took up two sheets of paper. He held one sheet in each hand. In his
Melville's Rose Poems71
left was the first stanza which simply noted the Romans' lachrymose
custom. It was all amusingly lugubrious, ending melodramatically with
an ancient lover "wending" about in search of teardrops, the ritual a
hopeless act: "Ah, the vial hot with tears/For the ashes cold in urn!"
But this was all in "pagan times of yore." Now in this modern Christian
age, the "Good News" is resurrection: we shall meet again, so no need
for tears or vials. Melville had set up a cagey false dichotomy between
pagan and Christian times. If only the Romans had known about the
solace of resurrection as we do today, they would not have made such a
fuss. We live in faith that attar, the fragrance and essence of roses, per-
sists beyond the life of the bloom. We happy Christians know eternity.
Thank God for revelation.
But in his right hand, Melville held the contradicting final stanza. A
new modern Christian lover of the rose begins in confidence, knowing
that when his rose departs he will be "solaced" by his spiritual Vial, so-
laced by the knowledge of eternal afterlife. Just as the perfume of a lady
lingers in a room after she has left, the spirit remains with us. Or so the
consolation of Christian doctrine insists. Therefore, our confident lover
surpasses the Roman: "Less grieve I for the Tomb,/Not widowed of the
fragrance/If parted from the bloom." Melville looked at the period after
"bloom" that put a stop to that thought. He brought up a pencil and
converted it to a dash. There is something ominous about a dash. And
the lines that follow would fulfill such omens by undoing all confidence
expressed before.
If parted from the bloom—
Parted from the bloom
That was but for a day;
Rose! I dally with thy doom:
The solace will not stay!
There is nothing like the bloom;
And the Attar poignant minds me
Of the bloom that's passed away.
That dash marks a change of heart. Despite his insistence on Christian
faith, the lover of the rose, this "amoroso," cannot find solace in the
spiritual attar; it is the bloom he wants. The fragrance only reminds
him of a living bloom he can never have again. Faith in essence is not72John Bryant enough; there is nothing like the soft "spousal" hugging of the flesh. Nothing. It was noon. Melville would work through lunch. And here is how things stood. He had a dozen poems in his file and five of them he was certain of: the carnal "Amoroso," the breakdown poem "Vial of Attar," the transfiguring "Rose Window," the prayerful "Beads," and his resur- rectional "Devotion." Some time ago, he had taken a sheet and made a Table of Contents. He still had that sheet. "Amoroso" was at the top of the list, and the other four along with "Chateau Rose" he had bunched at the end. Six other poems ranged between the two groups. They were "To a Friend" (short, metaphysical, bland), "Hearth-Roses" (a scent of fall's burning leaves), "Under a Cloud" (now lost), "Under the Snow" and "The New Rosicrucians" (both passionate but sacred), and "The Gardener's Boy" (equating virginity with the tomb). Glancing at "To a Friend," Melville recalled having fiddled with its placement. The poem strolls by a stream and muses that since life is a dream, then our sorrows are phantoms, too. Conventional wisdom tells us not to worry over phantoms. But what logic is this? the poem asks. Phantoms make the "spirit cower." This consolation of seeing all life as a dream is specious. The nine-liner called "To a Friend" recaps "The Vial of Attar," and far more directly. Melville's old table of contents told him that he had first placed the poem second, right after "Amo- roso" and nowhere near "Vial of Attar." But what logic was this? He, therefore, had moved the poem away from hot "Amoroso" closer to his tenser attar poem of conflict. He had even considered adding a new poem altogether, "Wine Benign," which by its title (for that is all that remains) conveys a masculine jocularity decidedly inappropriate for the collection. So, too, was "To a Friend," for it contradicted the validity of dream by associating it with fearful phantoms. And what was the logic of this? For in "Rose Window," a dream is an artful transfiguration. Not wanting to muddy the waters, Melville dropped "To a Friend," just as he had dropped "Wine Benign." His current table of contents was a quagmire of revisions. On it were actually two lists of poems, two possible tables of contents, one on each side of the sheet with a vertical line drawn between them. Atop the line like a flag of resolution were the words "As They Fell." But the lists below were riddled with indecision. That flag was beginning to look more like a surrender. The double list of titles ranging down the sheet
Melville's Rose Poems73
documented a radical revision of his earliest ordering of the poems. Left
of center was a tentative table:
Four Beds from a Rosary
Vial of Attar
Hearth-Roses
The New Rosicrucians
To ________
Under the Snow
Under a Cloud
Amoroso
Chateau Rose
Gardener's Boy
The Rose Window
The Devotion of the Flowers
"Rose Window" and "Devotion" remained, as always, at the end, but
"To a Friend" was back—disguised, however, as "To ________," as if
the blank would cover up its inadequacy. "Four Beads" was now on top;
"Vial" and "Amoroso" had switched places.
The method of removing "Four Beads" from its "churchy" surround-
ings at the end and putting it first in the new list was that the little de-
votionals might provide, like the announcement of leitmotifs in an
overture, an introduction to the entire collection. Melville was not par-
ticularly pleased with the first of the four, but the other three like dis-
tant claps of thunder seemed to call the devout to church. Here is what
his thunder said:
"Adore die Roses" (use them now),
"Have the Roses" (live up to their light and you will be transfigured)
"Hedge well thy Roses" (death is evercreeping)
The hint of death in that last bead prefigures the problem of death in
"Vial." Melville's new strategy was to begin with conflict and to spread
his more sensual poems throughout the body of the collection. Now,
"Vial of Attar" would pair nicely with another poem, "Hearth-Roses."
Like Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, "Hearth-Roses" draws attention to
"that time of year" in late autumn when evening fires are dying out.
Melville's focus on the burning of maple leaves, however, is not so dark:You can also read
