Writing beyond Prophecy by Kevorkian Martin;

Author:Kevorkian, Martin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2013-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Poem and Pilgrimage

Melville does so as a poet, even as the “sacred” poet for whom Hawthorne calls from those empty galleries. And he does so in a vein that might well be compared to the Emersonian path, especially if we take seriously David Robinson’s corrective view of Emerson and how he experienced the “close identity between poetry and the spiritual life, a closeness that at times transformed ‘poetry’ into a kind of synonym for religious insight.”15 But not, when viewed closely over some four decades of Emerson’s career, an insight marked by blithe prophetic confidence: “Despite his ostensible identity as both a visionary and an optimist, the history of Emerson’s religious experience is one of crisis, inner struggle, and a personal attempt to find a new grounding and stable assurance for his religious outlook. In that effort the poet and his methods were a crucial point of reference” (95). Clarel records such a crisis, through a poetics forged to enact an earnest spiritual striving in the aftermath of certainty (whether previously seized in romantic presumption or assumed through a short-circuiting of orthodox faith). In its syntactical difficulty and its argumentative flux, it achieves an Emersonian ideal of poetry: “By setting the mind’s energy in motion, poetry causes all settled things to be reconsidered.16 Poetry drives us out of complacency; its ‘supreme value’ is ‘to educate us to a height beyond itself’” (108). Undertaking what Emerson terms the “lonely faith” of poetry (109), Clarel, as Poem and Pilgrimage, marks the slow and painful process toward that self-transcending education.

Discovering how Melville’s poetic method might contribute to that journey has been a long-standing challenge. As one 1876 reviewer usefully framed the problem (only to dismiss it), “We confess that we are puzzled by the title of Mr. Herman Melville’s last volume—‘Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land.’ How a book can be a poem in the Holy Land, or a pilgrimage in the Holy Land, or a pilgrimage at all, or how it can be both a poem and a pilgrimage, we cannot really discover. The fact of the matter, set forth in simple English, is, that ‘Clarel’ is a poem which narrates and comments upon a pilgrimage in the Holy Land” (The Galaxy, 22.2 [August 1876], 286).17 But of course the poem itself is not set forth in this reviewer’s version of simple English, and, especially as Clarel explicitly arrays its poetic resources against the clarifying reductions of “prosing Science” (113) and its accounting for matters of fact, we might do well to recall that Melville here offers something other than prose narrative.18

A dominant critical assessment of the later Melville applauds him for a tough-minded, clear-eyed empiricism. “The sentence we need,” Denis Donoghue tells us, “is, ‘Rejecting all solutions, he but acknowledged facts.’”19 This plain-spoken assertion is taken as “Melville’s ideal human image. We find it in the character of Rolfe, Melville’s spokesman in Clarel, whose mind, Clarel tells us in Part IV of the poem, is ‘poised at self-center and mature’” (Donoghue, 93; Clarel, NN 12:398).

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