Virtual Stump the Scholars

Lucretius?

A couple of years ago, I came up with what I thought would be a great question for the annual Stump the Scholars session at the MDM. Because that question never was used (and probably is too long to ever be used), I'll post it here for anyone who might care to take a shot at it:

This question relates to an image employed by Melville to capture the appearance of sunlight.

In their critical edition of On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) by the Roman poet Lucretius, the classical scholars William Ellery Leonard (who was himself a poet) and Stanley Barney Smith compared an image used by Lucretius to similar images in a poem by Rudyard Kipling, a poem by A. E. Housman, and Moby-Dick. I will provide below a translation of what Lucretius wrote and then the comparable lines from Kipling and Housman, and my question will be, What metaphor did Melville use in Moby-Dick to describe something similar?

First, this is Lucretius:

Neither the spokes of the sun nor the shining spears of day

can dispel the fearful shadows from our soul,

but only the face and law of Nature.

The image that Leonard and Smith focused on is "the shining spears of day." They compared it to these lines by Kipling:

Far to Southward they wheel and glance,

The million molten spears of morn

And they also compared it to these lines by Housman:

And where the light in lances

Across the mead was laid

The question is: What metaphor did Melville use that is comparable to "the shining spears of day," "the million molten spears of morn," and "the light in lances"? Extra credit if you know what chapter it's in.

One hint: It's not "harpoons." That would be way too easy. But it is an edged weapon.

Another hint: He uses the same metaphor once to describe the spouts of a herd of sperm whales.

drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries...

Overshadowed by "Howl"

Listening today to the podcast of BBC's Witness (the most consistently interesting nine minutes on radio and a sterling example of public broadcasting), I was reminded that Allen Ginsberg was not the only poet reading at the Six Gallery on October 7, 1955.

Michael McClure presented three poems, including For the Death of 100 Whales — way ahead of his time in environmental awareness. Listen to him read it at 6:35...

Text of the poem can be found here.

"They have killed him, the Forgiver"

 One hundred and forty-six years ago, at approximately 10:20 pm, the audience watching Our American Cousin in Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., was startled to hear a woman's scream from the president's box and see a young man, whom many recognized as the actor John Wilkes Booth, jump clumsily from the box to the stage, shouting "Sic semper tyrannis!" before running out the back of the theatre.  The audience soon learned that the president had been shot in the back of the head.  He would remain unconscious until his death the next morning at 7:22.


Abraham Lincoln was the first U.S. president to be assassinated.  Among those shocked by the deed was Herman Melville.  His poem "The Martyr" indicated (in his words) "the passion of the people on the 15th day of April, 1865."  The first stanza:

Good Friday was the day
    Of the prodigy and crime,
When they killed him in his pity,
    When they killed him in his prime
Of clemency and calm--
        When with yearning he was filled
        To redeem the evil-willed,
And, though conqueror, be kind;
    But they killed him in his kindness,
    In their madness and their blindness,
And they killed him from behind.

In his note on the poem in Battle-Pieces, Melville sought to explain its accusatory tone in terms of the "period of excitement" immediately following the assassination.  At that time, "the thought was by some passionately welcomed that the Presidential successor [i.e., Vice President Andrew Johnson] had been raised up by heaven to wreak vengeance on the South. ... But the expectations built hereon (if, indeed, ever soberly entertained), happily for the country, have not been verified."