Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 27: Melville's Civil War poems (1)

Herman Melville wrote a series of poems about the Civil War, published in 1866 as Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War. Here is the account of that work given by Elizabeth Hardwick in her Penguin Lives biography, Herman Melville (2000):

Battle-Pieces, more than a hundred verses, considers all the high points of the war: Antietam, Gettysburg, Sherman in Georgia, Shiloh, the surrender at Appomattox, and the scattered elegies for the unknown dead. Bravery and tragedy, a sense of foreboding, an added prose plea for "reasonable consideration of our late enemies." The publication of the book received more disparagement from distinguished Americans than praise here and there. His moderation, sympathy for both sides of the conflict, offended, and one critic called his verse "epileptic."

Here is William Dean Howells writing that the poems lead one to doubt "there has really been a great war, with battles fought by men and bewailed by women: Or is it only that Mr. Melville's inner consciousness has been perturbed, filled with phantasms of enlistments, marches, fights in the air, parenthetic bulletin-boards, and tortured humanity shedding, not words and blood, but words alone?"

The final thought in Daniel Aaron's splendid book on American writers and the Civil War. "By portraying the War as historical tragedy, Melville defied consensus and took one further step toward popular oblivion."

Melville, of course, emerged from "popular oblivion", even if it was after his death. And his Civil War poems still have value, not least for their contemporary impressions.

One of the poems that particularly struck me is, "The Armies of the Wilderness (1863-4)". His patriotic partisanship for the Union is not in doubt. The poem opens with:

Like snows the camps on Southern hills
Lay all the winter long,
Our levies there in patience stood —
They stood in patience strong.
On fronting slopes gleamed other camps
Where faith as firmly clung:
Ah, froward kin! so brave amiss -
The zealots of the Wrong.

In this strife of brothers
(God, hear their country call),
However it be, whatever betide,
Let not the just one fall.

But Melville was very much aware of the ugly tragedy of war. He said while seeing newly-recruited soldiers march through the streets of New York, "All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys." That may partly have reflected his own age at the time. Because, in fact, many of the soldiers on both sides were considerably older than boys, in their later 20s and their 30s.

In any case, this poem reflects a sense of the human costs of war. In this segment, he looks at the sad state of our species as manifested in war:

Did the Fathers feel mistrust?
Can no final good be wrought?
Over and over, again and again
Must the fight for the Right be fought?

Here he looks at the sense of Southern honor as it drove the Confederate army:

Such brave ones, foully snared
By Belial's wily plea,
Were faithful unto the evil end -
Feudal fidelity

The poem is constructed as a kind of dialogue, with the eight-line sections in regular type, as in the first section quoted here, describing actions in a more naturalistic way with the Union cause constantly in mind, and the four-line sections in italics a more somber reflection on the tragedy of the situation. It could be the narrator stating the first eight lines of each exchange aloud, with the final four lines an internal reflection, maybe a voice of conscience more disturbed at the terrible contradictions of war. Or it could be a dialogue between two people, one recountin the battle factually but with excitement for the cause, the other, perhaps older voice, more disturbed at the wastefulness and horror of it all.

As the poem progresses, the contrast between the two perspectives seems to become more pronounced. Near the end, this 12-line dialogue occurs:

Watch and fast, march and fight - clutch your gun!
Day-fights and night-fights; sore is the stress;
Look, through the pines what line comes on?
Longstreet slants through the hauntedness!
Tis charge for charge, and shout for yell :
Such battles on battles oppress —
But Heaven lent strength, the Right strove well,
And emerged from the Wilderness.

Emerged, for the way was won;
But the Pillar of Smoke that led
Was brand-like with ghosts that went up
Ashy and red.

The first narrative voice is more in cheerleader mode, but it is also more reflective than earlier, as reflected by the concreteness of the pines becoming "the hauntedness", and the triumph of "the Right" described with a more neutral "emerged from the Wilderness". Survival rather than victory becomes the focus.

The second voice replies focusing on the terrible cost in lives, invoking the grim finality of death, even as it suggests the "ghosts" of the dead survive in spirit form. The contrast is starker than ever between the two, with the second voice focusing less on the more concrete images like "this strife of brothers", as in its first appearance, and more on the spiritual and abstract images of the Biblical Pillar of Smoke and the ghosts of the tormented dead ascending.

But in the end, the two voices suddenly converge toward each other in their perspectie:

None can narrate that strife in the pines,
A seal is on it — Sabaean lore!
Obscure as the wood, the entangled rhyme
But hints at the maze of war -
Vivid glimpses or livid through peopled gloom,
And fires which creep and char -
A riddle of death, of which the slain
Sole solvers are.

Long they withhold the roll
Of the shroudless dead. It is right;
Not yet can we bear the flare
Of the funeral light.

In the end, the first voice speaks of the mystery of death, and it is the second that concerns itself with the material images of "the shroudless dead".

It is worth remembering in that connection that many civilians saw with their own eyes the battlefields littered with the dead and the dying, and heard the sounds and smelled the smells that came with the sight. These wars were fought close to populated areas, not in some far-off country. So for many, the "the shroudless dead" on the battlefield were vivid personal memories in 1866, and not just for veterans of the fighting.

Tags: battle pieces, confederate heritage month 2008, herman melville