John Marr And Other Poems

by Herman Melville

Overview

Melville's verse printed for the most part privately in small editions from middle life onward after his great prose work had been written, taken as a whole, is of an amateurish and uneven quality. In it, however, that loveable freshness of personality, which his philosophical dejection never quenched, is everywhere in evidence. It is clear that he did not set himself to master the poet's art, yet through the mask of conventional verse which often falls into doggerel, the voice of a true poet is heard. In selecting the pieces for this volume I have put in the vigorous sea verses of John Marr in their entirety and added those others from his Battle Pieces, Timoleon, etc., that best indicate the quality of their author's personality. The prose supplement to battle pieces has been included because it does so much to explain the feeling of his war verse and further because it is such a remarkably wise and clear commentary upon those confused and troublous days of post-war reconstruction. H. C.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781533585264
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	01/01/1900
Pages:	82
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.17(d)

About the Author

Herman Melville was born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin-boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachussetts (where he was the impetuous friend and neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and was hard at work on his masterpiece Moby-Dick.

Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and uncollated, packed tidily away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.

Date of Birth:

August 1, 1819

Date of Death:

September 28, 1891

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

New York, New York

Education:

Attended the Albany Academy in Albany, New York, until age 15

Read an Excerpt

TOM DEADLIGHT During a tempest encountered homeward-bound from the Mediterranean, a grizzled petty-officer, one of the two captains of the forecastle, dying at night in his hammock, swung in the sick-bay under the tiered gun-decks of the British Dreadnaught, 98, wandering in his mind, though with glimpses of sanity, and starting up at whiles, sings by snatches his good-bye and last injunctions to two messmates, his watchers, one of whom fans the fevered tar with the flap of his old sou'wester. Some names and phrases, with here and there a line, or part of one; these, in his aberration, wrested into incoherency from their original connection and import, he voluntarily derives, as he does the measure, from a famous old sea- ditty, whose cadences, long rife, and now humming in the collapsing brain, attune the last flutterings of distempered thought. Farewell and adieu to you noble hearties, Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain, For I've received orders for to sail for the Deadman, But hope with the grand fleet to see you again. I have hove my ship to, with main-top-sail aback, boys; I have hove my ship to, for the strike soundings clear The black scud a'flying; but, by God's blessing, dam' me, Right up the Channel for the Deadman I'll steer. I have worried through the waters that are called the Doldrums, And growled at Sargasso that clogs while ye grope Blast my eyes, but the light-ship is hid by the mist, lads: Flying Dutchmanodds bobbsoff the Cape of Good Hope! But what's this I feel that is fanning my cheek, Matt? The white goney's wing?how she rolls! "t is the Cape! Give my kit to the mess, Jock, for kin none is mine, none; And tell Holy Joe to avast with the crape. Deadreckoning, says Joe, it won't do to go...