Remember your PARADISE LOST

Paradise Lost: Satan Alarmed  (1794)
Jean Pierre Simon after Richard Westall
 Image Credit: Art of the Print

Happily for us, opinionators Ted Widmer and Cynthia Wachtell have renewed interest Melville's Civil War poems, with timely sesquicentennial looks at "The Conflict of Convictions" and "Misgivings" from Battle-Pieces (1866) and "Inscription for the Dead at Fredericksburgh," revised in manuscript from the earlier variant submitted to and published (along with Lincoln's Gettysburg Address) in the star-spangled charity anthology Autograph Leaves (1864).

What's missing in the pieces by Widmer and Wachtell is a frame of reference big enough to accommodate the scale of Melville's artistic reach as a poet. Hershel Parker's Melville: The Making of the Poet (Northwestern University Press, 2007) gives the background essential for understanding the scope of Melville's grand artistic ambitions. But the quickest fix I can think of is to read the superb Leviathan essay by Robin Grey, "Annotations on Civil War: Melville's Battle Pieces and Milton's War in Heaven" Leviathan 4 (March and October 2002) pages 51-70. That whole wonderful Special Issue is devoted to Melville and Milton. But Grey's Leviathan article shows the pervasive influence of Milton on Battle-Pieces:

Hell's reception of the rebel angels is the beginning not only of Paradise Lost (Milton's epic begins in Hell) but also may be the starting point for Melville's Battle-Pieces, if we credit Melville's claim in his preface, that "this volume originated in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond." ("Annotations on Civil War," page 66)

For the later book version, get Melville & Milton: An Edition and Analysis of Melville's Annotations on Milton (Duquesne University Press, 2004).

• https://www.amazon.com/Melville-Milton-Melvilles-Annotations-Renaissance/dp/0820703524

Cynthia Wachtell's discussion of the "Fall of Richmond" in her book War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914 (Louisiana State University Press, 2010) shows why we need a Milton revival among Melville readers and critics. Had Wachtell remembered Paradise Lost, or read Robin Grey in Leviathan, she would not have puzzled over the strangely "original" reference to Satan in "The Fall of Richmond":

Melville even went so far as to suggest that the North’s victory would bring about the triumph of heaven over hell.  Using one of the most original—and surely one of the oddest—invectives to be penned during the entire war, Melville referred to the southern enemy as “the helmed dilated Lucifer.”  -- War No More

Back in 1950, Henry Pommer in Milton and Melville more precisely identified Melville's source for "dilated Lucifer" as the portait of Gabriel's antagonist Satan  in the fourth book of Paradise Lost:
 

On the other side, Satan, alarmed,
Collecting all his might, dilated stood,
Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremoved:
His stature reached the sky, and on his crest
Sat Horror plumed.... (985-989)

Speaking of Miltonic reach, an essay from Addison's Spectator proclaims of this memorable scene:

The conference between Gabriel and Satan abounds with sentiments proper for the occasion, and suitable to the persons of the two speakers. Satan clothing himself with terror when he prepares for the combat is truly sublime, and at least equal to Homer's description of Discord, celebrated by Longinus, or to that of Fame in Virgil, who are both represented with their feet standing upon the earth, and their heads reaching above the clouds.  -- The British Essayists

Yes Satan alarmed and "dilated" was a famous image, engraved by Jean Pierre Simon, painted by Richard Westall for Boydell's sumptuously illustrated edition Poetical Works of John Milton.

Explicating a line from "The Conflict of Convictions" Ted Widmer reads "he" in political terms as President Buchanan, but "he" in Melville's poem is in fact printed "He" with the upper-case "H" conventionally designating Deity. Melville gives it a wicked ambiguous twist, for sure, but the printed word in every version I have ever seen is "He" not "he."

So, not the White House but "heaven" is old and cold.

The weather was not good inside Melville’s poems; a blustery wind served as a perfect metaphor for the angry speeches on all sides, rending the Union: “I know a wind in purpose strong — it spins against the way it drives.” (Ted Widmer)

Here again the same problem, too small a frame of reference. Widmer the ex-speechwriter wants nothing to do with cosmic forces or high flown allusions to Milton. God must mean the sitting U. S. President, wind must mean partisan political rhetoric. But in Melville's poem the wind that spins against the way it drives is plainly not of human manufacture. As metaphor this wild yet willful, contrarily purposive wind represents uncontrollable, unpredictable determinations of bigger powers, say Nature or Necessity or Fate. Robert Penn Warren got it, explaining this "brilliant metaphor" of the wind as "one of the ideas, and ironies, which dominate Battle-Pieces—the idea that there may 'be a strong necessity' which underlies history."

A later passage from "Conflict" (lines 74-79), again in Warren's words:

develops, of course, the irony in the metaphor of the wind in line 64.  The war is being fought for freedom, but even in the victory "unanointed" power may come to work against the very assumptions of the old republic, first, by 'Dominion' over foreign lands... 

-- Selected Poems of Herman Melville, page 353

The Iron Dome emerges for Warren as Melville's "image of the new 'power state,' created in the process of defending the Old Union, but in actuality working to destroy the very principles on which the old Union had been established."

But back to Milton. Early in his explanatory note to "The Conflict of Convictions," Warren feels obliged to cite Melville's "reference to the 'latter fall'" as "one of the several which set the poem in relation to Paradise Lost." Further discussion of the poem requires setting the stage with  a nod to Milton.

In the Albany of Melville's youth, by the way, War in Heaven was considered a matter for schoolgirls, literally. In July 1836, when Melville's sisters received awards at the Albany Female Academy, third prize for best student composition (after even worthier essays on the "Constitution of Man" and "Traits of Indian Character") went to the anonymously-submitted essay on the "Genius of John Milton":

"The writer seems fully to have appreciated the plan and imbibed the spirit of the great poet. She is thrilled with wonder and awe at the martial array and dread artillery of Heaven—at the dire conflict and fearful discomfiture of Satan and his legions." 
(Albany Evening Journal, July 22, 1836)

And in Connecticut Lyman Beecher dramatically communicated the heroism of Satan when reading aloud from Paradise Lost to his daughter:

"Genius and heroism would move him even to tears. I recollect hearing him read aloud Milton's account of Satan's marshaling his forces of fallen angels after his expulsion from heaven. The description of Satan's courage and fortitude was read with such evident sympathy as quite enlisted me in his favor...." 

-- Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe

 OK, time to go. There's this book I have to get now...

dreadful glory

Isaac Watts, by unknown artist. 
National Portrait Gallery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Glorious! to find poetry by Melville appreciatively discussed in so respectable a place as the NY Times Opnionator, in the recent online commentary by Cynthia Wachtell, Melville's About-Face. Wachtell is doing something I love, comparing different versions of texts. John Bryant by the way wrote a great book about the pleasures of that enterprise, The Fluid Text (University of Michigan Press, 2002) well deserving of wider readership. In her Opinionator piece, Wachtell essentially offers what Bryant would call a revision narrative to account for two small yet potentially significant changes Melville made (or rather tried to make before publication) to the text of his brief Civil War poem, "Inscription for the Slain at Fredericksburgh." As Wachtell explains, Melville wanted to change "Slain" in the title to "Dead," and "glory" to "dreadful glory." A third change, "Strown" to "Strewn" receives no comment. There we catch Melville regretting his grammar. To discuss that about-face gets you deep into the grammar of weak verbs with strong past participles. Yow! No wonder Watchell won't touch "strown" or "strewn."

Let's just say Melville rejected "strown" as distractingly archaic, and let it go.

Wachtell unconvicingly treats "slain" and "dead" as synonyms with different connotations or associations, one ("slain") more romantic and one ("dead") more realistic. But wait, these words are not semantically the same, not quite. Slain means killed by someone, even murdered, violently--right? Slain conjures the slayer. Dead seems by contrast more neutral, concerned with the fact of death, not the manner. Melville's tribute memorializes the military dead as proactive heroes of their own lives. They acted bravely, performed a deed worthy of a song. Slain threatens to steal some of that hard-won glory from the patriot and give it to the rebel. Forget for now the Confederate slayers, this one is for the noble Union dead.

Wachtell reads the d-words "dead" and "dreadful" as attempts by Melville to modify a conventionally pious stance through the "starker" language of "nascent realism." This interpretation strangely conflates romanticism and reverence, regarded as equally quaint and delusional, apparently, to which Wachtell opposes realism, regarded it seems as a later, less embarrassing stage of human development. But who in the world, any world, wants realism on a memorial inscription to dead soldiers? But let that go, for now. I truly meant to consider "dreadful glory," the interesting change from this

A glory lights an earnest end;

to this:

A dreadful glory lights an earnest end;

Wachtell sees in "dreadful" a change of heart, Melville's "about-face" away from the familiarly worshipful "glory":

His insertion of “dreadful” to modify “glory,” like the substitution of “dead” for “slain,” subtly alters and challenges the otherwise reverential tone of the work.  (Melville's About-Face)

But here's the thing. The change to "dreadful glory" makes the tone more not less reverential. Whatever tension or conflict the word dreadful poses for "glory" is thoroughly traditional. The challenge perceived by Wachtell derives not from the dictionary of realism, but the dictionary of Protestant hymnody and theology. God's righteousness (glory) is conventionally placed alongside the terror of God's (dreadful) wrath. Melville's change to "dreadful glory" echoes a number of Protestant hymns, most notably Psalm 65 in the verse translation by the "progenitor of the English congregational hymn" Isaac Watts. Watts's psalms in Melville's day were widely available, collected (and awaiting perusal at Google Books) for example in popular hymnbooks such as A Pastor's Selection of Hymns (Philadelphia, 1860).

With dreadful glory God fulfils
What his afflicted saints request;
And with almighty wrath reveals
His love, to give his churches rest. 

Then shall the flocking nations run
To Zion's hill, and own their Lord;
The rising and the setting sun
Shall see the Savior's name adored. 

-- Psalm 65 in the Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs of the Rev. Isaac Watts, D.D.

We knew Melville liked to use (and abuse?) Watts. Hershel Parker has called attention to the borrowing from Watts in Moby-Dick:

The words to popular hymns were often composed by notable religious poets such as Isaac Watts and William Cowper. Melville makes his lank Bildad, for example, sing Watts’s “A Prospect of Heaven Makes Death Easy” as he pilots the Pequod out of Nantucket in chapter 22 of Moby-Dick. 

-- Hershel Parker, Melville: The Making of the Poet (Northwestern University Press, 2008) page 24.

And we knew Melville made poetic use of other metrical adaptations from the Psalms, not only from Watts. Again in Moby-Dick, Father Mapple's hymn is reworked from Psalm 18 in the hymnal of the Protestant Reformed Dutch Church, as demonstrated by Steven Olsen-Smith. Citation:

Olsen-Smith, Steven. "The Hymn in Moby-Dick: Melville's Adaptation of "Psalm 18"." Leviathan, vol. 5 no. 1, 2003, pages 29-47. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/492710. 

So rather than a jolt of "nascent realism," Melville's change to "dreadful" would have interposed the uncomfortable but nonetheless familiar Protestant view of God, or the divine, or divine dispensations, as terrifyingly awesome. This connection happens right away in the first line. Subsequent language similarly evokes Christian history and eschatology: a time of joyful restoration ("jubilee") when souls ("ghosts") are "transfigured." When are they transfigured?  The end time, raptured even to the "rapturous height" of, what, heaven?

No! The fallen at Fredericksburg are "transfigured" at the "rapturous height"

Of their passionate feat of arms.

Feat or defeat? Why "passionate"? Melville again employs biblical language to honor the dead as, well, like Christ and Christ's passion in their ultimate self-sacrifice.

The parallel to Christ is reinforced in the closing line, as Jason Skonieczny nicely points out in a comment on Watchtell's Opinionator essay:

"Strown their vale of death with palms" renders the fallen into Christlike victims"

As Skonieczny observes, the effects of the parallel are arguable. This indeed is where all the argumentative fun properly starts. Did the dead patriots martyr themselves, rapture themselves, transfigure themselves by their dauntless, thoughtless courage? And the best line has to be the fifth:

 Death to the brave's a starry night,---

Wow! What could be finer than that? Melville liked it so well he ended "Chattanooga" with the same line, slightly revised, in Battle-Pieces. 

But in the memorial poem for the fallen at Fredericksburgh, you need to get the allusion to Christ, and recognize some of the biblical terms and themes to begin to get what Melville was about.
Along with references to passion, palms, rapture and transfiguration, the nod to Watts in "dreadful glory" shows Melville aiming high, investing his brief "Inscription" with the hallmark of an old and much-beloved religious hymn. 

Inscription For the Dead At Fredericksburgh

A dreadful glory lights an earnest end;

In jubilee the patriot ghosts ascend;

Transfigured at the rapturous height

    Of their passionate feat of arms,

Death to the brave's a starry night, ---

    Strewn their vale of death with palms.

-- Herman Melville's Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth (Northwestern University Press, 1993); and Published Poems, edited by Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Northwestern University Press, 2009); and the Google Group Ishmailites. 

Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons