Herman Melville

from Billy Budd

IN THE TIME BEFORE STEAMSHIPS, or then more frequently than now, a stroller along the docks of any considerable sea-port would occasionally have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed mariners, man-of-war's men or merchant-sailors in holiday attire ashore on liberty. In certain instances they would flank, or, like a body-guard quite surround some superior figure of their own class, moving along with them like Aldebaran among the lesser lights of his constellation. That signal object was the "Handsome Sailor" of the less prosaic time alike of the military and merchant navies. With no perceptible trace of the vainglorious about him, rather with the off-hand unaffectedness of natural regality, he seemed to accept the spontaneous homage of his shipmates. 

*****

At sea in the old time, the execution by halter of a military sailor was generally from the fore-yard. In the present instance, for special reasons the main-yard was assigned. Under an arm of that yardthe prisoner was presently brought up, the Chaplain attending him. It was noted at the time and remarked upon afterwards, that in this final scene the good man evinced little or nothing of the perfunctory. Brief speech indeed he had with the condemned one, but the genuine Gospel was less on his tongue than in his aspect and manner towards him. The final preparations personal to the latter being speedily brought to an end by two boatswain's-mates, the consummation impended. Billy stood facing aft. At the penultimate moment, his words, his only ones, words wholly unobstructed in the utterance were these–"God bless Captain Vere!" Syllables sounanticipated coming from one with the ignominious hemp about his neck— a conventional felon's benediction directed aft towards the quarters of honor; syllables too delivered in the clear melody of a singing-bird on the point of launching from the twig, had a phenomenal effect, not unenhanced by the rare personal beauty of the young sailor spiritualized now through late experiences so poignantly profound. 

Without volition as it were, as if indeed the ship's populace were but the vehicles of some vocal current electric, with one voice from alow and aloft came a resonant sympathetic echo–"God bless Captain Vere!" And yet at that instant Billy alone must have been in their hearts, even as he was in their eyes. At the pronounced words and the spontaneous echo that voluminously rebounded them, Captain Vere, either through stoic self-control or a sort of momentary paralysis induced by emotional shock, stood erectly rigid as a musket in the ship-armorer's rack. The hull deliberately recovering from the periodic roll to leeward was just regaining an even keel, when the last fatal death- signal, a preconcerted dumb one, was given. At the same moment it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn. In the pinioned figure, arrived at the yard-end, to the wonder of all, no motion was apparent,none–save that created by the ship's motion, in moderate weather so majestic in a great ship ponderously-cannoned.

Herman Melville

portrait, oil on canvas (1873), by Joseph Oriel Eaton

from Moby Dick
CHAPTER 42
THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE.

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Cæsarian heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies  to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things—the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power, by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in bloo

Robert Penn Warren

San Francisco Windows

So hangs the hour like fruit fullblown and sweet,
Our strict and desperate avatar,
Despite that antique westward gulls lament
Over enormous waters which retreat
Weary unto the white and sensual star.
Accept these images for what they are--
Out of the past a fragile element
Of substance into accident.
I would speak honestly and of a full heart;
I would speak surely for the tale is short,
And the soul's remorseless catalogue
Assumes its quick and piteous sum.
Think you, hungry is the city in the fog
Where now the darkened piles resume
Their framed and frozen prayer
Articulate and shafted in the stone
Against the void and absolute air.
If so the frantic breath could be forgiven,
And the deep blood subdued before it is gone
In a savage paternoster to the stone,
Then might we all be shriven.

Robert Penn Warren

from All the King's Men (1946)

“The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.” 

*****

“There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.” 

“Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price.” 
*****

“The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.

   

“So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the oldfield pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. IT is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.” 

*****

“If you want him to do it, you've got to change the picture of the world inside his head.”

*****

“...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?” 

*****

“(The law) is like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone’s to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind.” 

Robert Penn Warren

                                        Marcia Winslow. oil on canvas (1945

Night Hawk

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through 

Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds, 
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding 
The last tumultuous avalanche of 
Light above pines and the guttural gorge, 
The hawk comes. 
His wing 
Scythes down another day, his motion 
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear 
The crashless fall of stalks of Time. 

The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error. 

Look!Look!he is climbing the last light 
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under 
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings 
Into shadow. 

Long now, 
The last thrush is still, the last bat 
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics.His wisdom 
Is ancient, too, and immense.The star 
Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain. 

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear 
The earth grind on its axis, or history 
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

Karl Shapiro

The Leg

Among the iodoform, in twilight sleep,

What have I lost? he first inquires,
Peers in the middle distance where a pain,
Ghost of a nurse, hastily moves, and day,
Her blinding presence pressing in his eyes
And now his ears. They are handling him
With rubber hands. He wants to get up.

One day beside some flowers near his nose
He will be thinking, When will I look at it?
And pain, still in the middle distance, will reply,
At what? and he will know it’s gone,
O where! and begin to tremble and cry.
He will begin to cry as a child cries
Whose puppy is mangled under a screaming wheel.

Later, as if deliberately, his fingers
Begin to explore the stump. He learns a shape
That is comfortable and tucked in like a sock.
This has a sense of humor, this can despise
The finest surgical limb, the dignity of limping,
The nonsense of wheel-chairs. Now he smiles to the wall:
The amputation becomes an acquisition

For the leg is wondering where he is (all is not lost)

And surely he has a duty to the leg;
He is its injury, the leg is his orphan,
He must cultivate the mind of the leg,
Pray for the part that is missing, pray for peace
In the image of man, pray, pray for its safety,
And after a little it will die quietly.

The body, what is it, Father, but a sign
To love the force that grows us, to give back
What in Thy palm is senselessness and mud?
Knead, knead the substance of our understanding
Which must be beautiful in flesh to walk,
That if Thou take me angrily in hand
And hurl me to the shark, I shall not die.

Karl Shapiro

Scyros

 snuffle and snif and handkerchief

The doctor punched my vein
The captain called me Cain
Upon my belly sat the sow of fear
With coins on either eye
The President came by
And whispered to the lords what none could hear

High over where the storm
Stood steadfast cruciform
The golden eagle sank in wounded wheels
White negroes laughing still
Crept fiercely on Brazil
Turning the navies upward on their keels

Now one by one the trees
Stripped to their naked knees
To dance upon the heaps of shrunken dead
The roof of England fell
Great Paris tolled her bell
And China staunched her milk and wept for bread

Karl Shapiro

 

Editing Poetry

Next to my office where I edit poems ("Can poems be edited?") there is the Chicago Models club. All day the girls stroll past my door where I am editing poems, behind my head a signed photograph of Rupert Brooke, handsomer than any movie star. I edit, keeping one eye peeled for models, straining my ears to hear what they say. In there they photograph the girls on the bamboo furniture, glossies for the pulsing facades of night spots. One day the manager brings me flowers, a huge and damaged bouquet: hurt gladiolas, overly open roses, long-leaping ferns (least hurt), and bruised carnations. I accept the gift, remainder of last night's opening (where?), debut of lower-class blondes. I distribute the flowers in the other poetry rooms, too formal-looking for our disarray.

Now after every model's bow to the footlights the manager brings more flowers, hurt gladiolas, overly open roses, long-leaping ferns, and bruised carnations. I edit poems to the click of sharp high heels, flanked by the swords of lavendar debut, whiffing the cinnamon of crepe-paper-pink carnations of the bruised and lower-class blondes.

Behind me rears my wall of books, most formidable of himan barriers. No flower depresses me like the iris but these I have a fondness for. They bring stale memories ver the threshold of the street. They bring the night of cloth palm trees and soft plastic leopard charis, night of sticky drinks, the shining rhinestone hour in the dark-blue mirror, the peroxide chat of models and photogenic morn.

Today the manager brings all gladioli. A few rose petals lie in the corridor. The mail is heavy this morning.

Karl Shapiro

 

The Alphabet

The letters of the Jews as strict as flames 
Or little terrible flowers lean 
Stubbornly upwards through the perfect ages, 
Singing through solid stone the sacred names. 
The letters of the Jews are black and clean 
And lie in chain-line over Christian pages. 
The chosen letters bristle like barbed wire 
That hedge the flesh of man, 
Twisting and tightening the book that warns. 
These words, this burning bush, this flickering pyre 
Unsacrifices the bled son of man 
Yet plaits his crown of thorns. 

Where go the tipsy idols of the Roman 
Past synagogues of patient time, 
Where go the sisters of the Gothic rose, 
Where go the blue eyes of the Polish women 
Past the almost natural crime, 
Past the still speaking embers of ghettos, 
There rise the tinder flowers of the Jews. 
The letters of the Jews are dancing knives 
That carve the heart of darkness seven ways. 
These are the letters that all men refuse 
And will refuse until the king arrives 
And will refuse until the death of time 
And all is rolled back in the book of days.

Karl Shapiro

The Conscientious Objector

The gates clanged and they walked you into jail

More tense than felons but relieved to find

The hostile world shut out, the flags that dripped

From every mother’s windowpane, obscene

The bloodlust sweating from the public heart,

The dog authority slavering at your throat.

A sense of quiet, of pulling down the blind

Possessed you. Punishment you felt was clean.

The decks, the catwalks, and the narrow light

Composed a ship. This was a mutinous crew

Troubling the captains for plain decencies,

A Mayflower brim with pilgrims headed out

To establish new theocracies to west,

A Noah’s ark coasting the topmost seas

Ten miles above the sodomites and fish.

These inmates loved the only living doves.

Like all men hunted from the world you made

A good community, voyaging the storm

To no safe Plymouth or green Ararat;

Trouble or calm, the men with Bibles prayed,

The gaunt politicals construed our hate.

The opposite of all armies, you were best

Opposing uniformity and yourselves;

Prison and personality were your fate.

You suffered not so physically but knew

Maltreatment, hunger, ennui of the mind.

Well might the soldier kissing the hot beach

Erupting in his face damn all your kind.

Yet you who saved neither yourselves nor us

Are equally with those who shed the blood

The heroes of our cause. Your conscience is

What we come back to in the armistice.

H. D.

(1921)

 Oread

Whirl up, sea— 

whirl your pointed pines, 

splash your great pines 

on our rocks, 

hurl your green over us, 

cover us with your pools of fir. 

Edwin Rolfe

 This is the Season of Death

This is the sixth winter: 

this is the season of death 
when lungs contract and the breath of homeless men 
freezes on restaurant window panes---men seeking 
the sight of rare food 
before the head is lowered into the upturned collar 
and the shoulders haunched and the shuffling feet 
move away slowly, slowly disappear 
into a darkened street.

This is the season when rents go up: 
men die, and their dying is casual. 

"Crowds around post office. Lower East Side, New York," by Dorothea Lange 1936

REPOSITORY: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

I walk along a street, returning 
at midnight from my unit. Meet a man 
leaning against an illumined wall 
and ask him for a light. 
His open eyes 
stay fixed on mine. And cold rain falling 
trickles down his nose, his chin. 
"Buddy," I begin...and look more closely-- 
and flee in horror from the corpse's grin.

The eyes pursue you even in sleep and 
when you awake they stare at you from the ceiling; 
you see the dead face peering from your shoes; 
the eggs at Thompson's are the dead man's eyes. 
Work dims them for eight hours, but then-- 
the machines silent--they appear again.

Along the docks, in the terminals, in the subway, on the street, 
in restaurants--the eyes 
are focused from the river 
among the floating garbage 
that other men fish for, 
their hands around poles 
almost in prayer-- 
wanting to live, 
wanting to live! who also soon 
will stand propped by death against a stone-cold wall.

(1935)

Raymond Carver

Carver & Lish

from Cathedral (1983)

 Something about the church and the Middle Ages was on the TV. Not your run-of-the-mill TV fare. I wanted to watch something else. I turned to the other channels. But there was nothing on them, either. So I turned back to the first channel and apologized.

“Bub, it’s all right,” the blind man said. “It’s fine with me. Whatever you want to watch is okay. I’m always learning something. Learning never ends. It won’t hurt me to learn something tonight. I got ears,” he said.

We didn’t say anything for a time. He was leaning forward with his head turned at me, his right ear aimed in the direction of the set. Very disconcerting. Now and then his eyelids drooped and then they snapped open again. Now and then he put his fingers into his beard and tugged, like he was thinking about something he was hearing on the television.

On the screen, a group of men wearing cowls was being set upon and tormented by men dressed in skeleton costumes and men dressed as devils. The men dressed as devils wore devil masks, horns, and long tails. This pageant was part of a procession. The Englishman who was narrating the thing said it took place in Spain once a year. I tried to explain to the blind man what was happening.

“Skeletons,” he said. “I know about skeletons,” he said, and he nodded.

The TV showed this one cathedral. Then there was a long, slow look at another one. Finally, the picture switched to the famous one in Paris, with its flying buttresses and its spires reaching up

to the clouds. The camera pulled away to show the whole of the cathedral rising above the skyline.

There were times when the Englishman who was telling the thing would shut up, would simply let the camera move around over the cathedrals. Or else the camera would tour the countryside, men in fields walking behind oxen. I waited as long as I could. Then I felt I had to say something. I said, “They’re showing the outside of this cathedral now. Gargoyles. Little statues carved to look like monsters. Now I guess they’re in Italy. Yeah, they’re in Italy. There’s paintings on the walls of this one church.”

“Are those fresco painting, bub?” he asked, and he sipped from his drink.

I reached for my glass. But it was empty. I tried to remember what I could remember. “You’re asking me are those frescoes?” I said. “That’s a good question. I don’t know.”

The camera moved to a cathedral outside Lisbon. The difference in the Portuguese cathedral compared with the French and Italian were not that great. But they were there. Mostly the interior stuff. Then something occurred to me, and I said, “Something has occurred to me. Do you have any idea what a cathedral is? What they look like, that is? Do you follow me? If somebody says cathedral to you, do you have any notion what they’re talking about? Do you the difference between that and a Baptist church, say?”

He let the smoke dribble from his mouth. “I know they took hundreds of workers fifty or a hundred years to build,” he said. “I just heard the man say that, of course. I know generations of the same families worked on a cathedral. I heard him say that,

too. The men who began their life’s work on them, they never lived to see the completion of their work. In that wise, bub, they’re no different from the rest of us, right?” He laughed. Then his eyelids drooped again. His head nodded. He seemed to be snoozing. Maybe he was imagining himself in Portugal. The TV was showing another cathedral now. This one was in Germany. The Englishman’s voice droned on. “Cathedrals,” the blind man said. He sat up and rolled his head back and forth. “If you want the truth, bub, that’s about all I know. What I just said. What I heard him say. But maybe you could describe one to me? I wish you’d do it. I’d like that. If you want to know, I really don’t have a good idea.”

I stared hard at the shot of the cathedral on the TV. How could I even begin to describe it? But say my life depended on it. Say my life was being threatened by an insane guy who said I had to do it or else.

I stared some more at the cathedral before the picture flipped off into the countryside. There was no use. I turned to the blind man and said, “To begin with, they’re very tall.” I was looking around the room for clues. “They reach way up. Up and up. Toward the sky. They’re so big, some of them, they have to have these supports. To help hold them up, so to speak. These supports are called buttresses. They remind of viaducts, for some reason. But maybe you don’t know viaducts, either? Sometimes the cathedrals have devils and such carved into the front. Sometimes lords and ladies. Don’t ask me why this is,” I said.

He was nodding. The whole upper part of his body seemed to be moving back and forth.

“I’m not doing so good, am I?” I said.

Robert Lowell

                        Fred McDarrah. Lowell & Hardwick at Bleecker & Thompson (1965)

Children of Light

Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones
And fenced their gardens with the Redmen's bones;
Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,
Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva's night,
They planted here the Serpent's seeds of light;
And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock
The riotous glass houses built on rock,
And candles gutter by an empty altar,
And light is where the landless blood of Cain
Is burning, burning the unburied grain.