Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry by Riley Peter;

Author:Riley, Peter; [Riley, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2019-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

The first line comprises four rising beats and sets the metrical precedent for the majority of poem’s lines, a synthesis of metrical and urban structures. The “chamber low,” an enclosed place, is also a play on the poet’s choice of form, which is accordingly “scored by time”: either the chamber is scratched and striated, or given a time signature of four beats per line. It is out of this urban and prosodic confinement that the verse begins materially sculpting its representation of the subject—or the subjected—with Manhattan’s urban geography haunting various features of the Holy Land. The anastrophe “In chamber low” elides “In a low chamber” so that the line can accommodate the first two rising beats of the four-beat pattern. The effect of this opening is one of compaction; the sentence begins “In chamber low” and finishes six lines later with “A student sits, and broods alone.” The distance between the initial preposition “In” and its immediate governance, the “Masonry old,” is relatively easy to follow, but then the semicolon at the end of line three forces the connotation of the preposition forward, so that it appears also to govern “the student”: “In chamber low and scored by time [ … ] A student sits and broods alone.” The function of “In” is stretched to the end of the passage, and the reader, in search of grammatical resolution, compresses the intervening lines.

The chiastic movement of the passage produces an unmistakable brick-kiln compaction. Everything is ambiguously jammed in until the squeezed and disjointed subject becomes indistinguishable from his environment. Clarel begins with something complete, a “low chamber”; the second and third lines then dismember this totality into parts or qualities: it has lime-washed masonry, it resembles a tomb. The semicolon marking the mid-point of the six lines then quietly switches the referent, so that lines four and five now begin anatomizing the student: elbow on knee, brow sustained on sidelong hand. Line three, however, has introduced a metaphor—the chamber is “much like a tomb”—so a confusion arises as to whether “Elbow on knee and brow sustained” is an extension of this metaphor or something else. Does it refer to a sustaining beam that is holding up the brow of the tomb-like chamber? Or does it refer to a person? The passage lacks grammatical orientation: it is only when the fully formed student appears in the last line that we can definitely say: there is a student sitting in a room. The text’s subtle chiastic shift of “whole, parts; parts, whole’”—organized by the meter—compresses and elides subject and object. The student, embedded in his linguistic and physical surroundings, emerges as a fossil in the walls.

The “walls” of the poem are metrically made up of sixteen strongly felt beats over the first four lines, and a rhyme scheme that sets up the expectation of a resolution (aab[b]): time/lime/stone/[?]. Melville invokes the pull of a 4×4 pattern, but then prevents its completion with “sustained”: the flow of the sentence is sustained, as its

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