Melville and Modern War
A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight
Plain be the phrase, yet apt the verse,
More ponderous than nimble;
For since grimed War here laid aside
His painted pomp, 'twould ill befit
Overmuch to ply
The rhyme’s barbaric symbol.Hail to victory without the gaud
Of glory; zeal that needs no fans
Of banners; plain mechanic power
Plied cogently in War now placed -
Where War belongs -
Among the trades and artisans.Yet this was battle, and intense -
Beyond the strife of fleets heroic;
Deadlier, closer, calm 'mid storm;
No passion; all went on by crank,
Pivot, and screw,
And calculations of caloric.Needless to dwell; the story’s known.
The ringing of those plates on plates
Still ringeth round the world -
The clangor of the blacksmiths’ fray.
The anvil-din
Resounds this message from the Fates:War shall yet be, and to the end;
But war-paint shows the streaks of weather;
War yet shall be, but the warriors
Are now but operatives; War’s made
Less grand than Peace,
And a singe runs through lace and feather.
For twenty years I taught American poetry of the nineteenth century. The armature of the course was the poems of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, two writers who are arguably the greatest of all American poets. It increasingly struck me that Herman Melville, the celebrated author of the novel Moby-Dick, was the only other poet of that century who had a power and poetic vision that rivalled those two great contemporaries of his. It is not that I didn’t try other poets – Jones Very, James Russell Lowell, Stephen Crane. But no one’s poetry could stand up to the accomplishment of Whitman and Dickinson.
Ah, but Melville: A few of Melville’ poems have a staying power that is extraordinary. To this day, they reside permanently in my memory.
A poem of Melville’s, “On the Slain Collegians,” was resuscitated at the time of the Kent State University killings, in which police fired on a student demonstration against the Vietnam War and killed some of the demonstrators. It is a fine poem, remembered mostly for its title, but its fine-ness resides in something different than mere occasion: Its recognition (in the words of an earlier poem) that “All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.” What centers the poem is that young men died “with golden mottoes in the mouth,” that all “were swept by the wind of their place and time,” that each of them “caught/The maxims in his temple taught.”
I recall especially – the line occurs to me almost every week, and has through all my life since I first encountered it,
Warred one for Right, and one for Wrong?
So be it; but they both were young—
Each grape to his cluster clung,
All their elegies are sung. [Bolded italics added]
It is not the two couplets entire that have remained in my mind, but that phrase, “each grape to his cluster clung.” The image of the young, and of each of us, portrays each individual as a grape in a cluster of fruit, the individual fruit not different from all the other ‘grapes’ of our ‘place and time.’ As the line recurs in my memory, I realize that this is not only true of war, but all else, too. We are each a grape hanging in a cluster, not as individuated as we think we are. In war, in politics, in art, in every human activity and every aspect of our lives. This is for me a chastening thought, that we are grapes which are part of a cluster. . . .
Melville understood the terrible tragedy of war, although his understanding was both simple and dark: Not a tragedy but an unconscious yet deadly picnic.
Each bloomed and died an unabated Boy;
Nor dreamed what death was—thought it mere
Sliding into some vernal sphere
Or, as the earlier poem had it,
No berrying party, pleasure-wooed,
No picnic party in the May,
Ever went less loth than they
Into that leafy neighborhood.
Melville, ever the ironist who saw deep into the heart of things, understood war — despite the fact that he was never a combatant. He recognized, presciently, how the anarchy of the draft riots of his time led to a desire for authoritarian order to reign so that the riots could be ended. (“The House-Top A Night Piece.”)
And he understood the transformation of war that was taking place in the mid-nineteenth century. “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight” is all about how war (and poetry?) would henceforward be different, as mechanization and technology took the place of whatever barbaric practices preceded them.
Plain be the phrase, yet apt the verse,
More ponderous than nimble;
For since grimed War here laid aside
His painted pomp, 'twould ill befit
Overmuch to ply
The rhyme’s barbaric symbol.
The first stanza sets up the poem’s structure: Stanzas of six lines, with the second and sixth lines rhyming. The meter is irregular, in some ways – mostly four beat lines, with lines two and six in the first and last stanzas ending on a feminine (unstressed) syllable. And those fifth lines! Each with only two stresses! The poem is, in its strange fashion, ‘more ponderous than nimble.’ Not quite enough ‘painted pomp’ here to have amazed Alexander Pope or Geoffrey Chaucer, but not quite the “barbaric yawp” which Whitman attributed not only to the spotted hawk but to himself and his poetry.
What the first stanza tells us is that war is not what it once was. It is smeared with the greasy mark of the world, and thus not lovingly lyrical and orchestrated: It is without the “lace and feather” with which the poem will end. “Grimed War” has replaced the heroism, the “glory,” of earlier conflicts.
Melville sees the importance of the battle of Hampton Roads, the naval fight between the Monitor and the Merrimack, ironclad ships both, both powered by steam.
Strange, that his meditation on the battle should begin with an awareness that poetic rhetoric must change. He calls for plainness, even if that amounts to ponderous lines; he calls for a rejection of the classic symbolism of war as a contest between heroic participants. (It is hard to avoid the pun in the final word of the stanza, ‘symbol’ being so easily confused with ‘cymbal.’) A new music is being called for, commensurate with the new form of war that is inaugurated with this battle between iron-clad steam-powered warships.
Hail to victory without the gaud
Of glory; zeal that needs no fans
Of banners; plain mechanic power
Plied cogently in War now placed -
Where War belongs -
Among the trades and artisans.
The verse, plain and ponderous, is without “the gaud of glory,” just as the new warfare is. No banners. “Plain mechanic power” in a war fought by what we now call technocrats, tradesmen and artisans rather than heroes in the mold of those great archetypes for Western war, Achilles and Hector. Melville is recognizing that for the first time in more than thirty centuries something dramatically different marks warfare. Technology, rather than bravery – those “banners” – will determine “where War belongs.” This is no longer the Hephaestus of the Iliad creating shields: this is tradesmen, ironmongers and the crafters of steam machines, who create the weapons of war and determine how wars will be fought. (An irony: Hephaestus, who makes a shield for Achilles, is the god of blacksmiths and artisans…)
Today, it is “plain mechanic power,” used in a cogent way, that determines the course of battles and wars. Tradesmen and artisans, not glorious heroes, determine who wins battles – and wars.
Yet this was battle, and intense -
Beyond the strife of fleets heroic;
Deadlier, closer, calm 'mid storm;
No passion; all went on by crank,
Pivot, and screw,
And calculations of caloric.
Melville tells us, even if the fight is between steamships made by tradesmen, it is still “battle, and intense.” More intense, even, than the struggles of “heroic” times. Fierce, catastrophic, casualty-full. It is “deadlier” than what went on before: Death, being mechanized, is more widespread, even if “passion” does not occasion it, even if calm seas and not the hectic violence of earlier times creates the conditions for the battle. And then those words which prophesy modern warfare, in which technology and the machinery of death create mass liquidations where bravery is no longer an issue. “All went on by crank,/ Pivot, and screw,/ And calculations of caloric.” Whew. The enormous casualties of entrenched armies in World War I, the death by Zyklon-B of the concentration camps of World War II, the gigantic destruction of nuclear weapons, are prefigured in that phrase. Technology, “calculations of caloric,” now determines the fate of human beings in the military domain.
In my view, most historians regard the battle of Hampton Roads as the introduction of a new means of warfare, in particular those iron-clad ships. But Melville sees more deeply, for he understands that how wars are fought transforms warfare, not just in technological terms, but because warfare is now a matter of engineering and not of individual – however heroic – combat. That “calm” resonates and resonates. It is not a far leap from this stanza to modern aerial destruction, where men looking at computer screens in Kansas program drones that rain down destruction in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Ukraine. While Western portrayals of the war in Ukraine emphasize (rightly) the heroism of men and women fighting in trenches and among the ruins of largely-destroyed cities, that war is largely a matter of precision artillery fire directed by mechanical drones. “Calm…all went on by crank/Pivot, and screw,/ And calculations of caloric.”
Needless to dwell; the story’s known.
The ringing of those plates on plates
Still ringeth round the world -
The clangor of the blacksmiths’ fray.
The anvil-din
Resounds this message from the Fates:
The first three lines of this fourth stanza recognize the historic event, even as Melville sees, deeply, that all is transformed. The iron plates added to the Merrimack, the iron construction of the Monitor, are indeed made by “artisans” and tradespeople, and they do have a “message” for the world.
War shall yet be, and to the end;
But war-paint shows the streaks of weather;
War yet shall be, but the warriors
Are now but operatives; War’s made
Less grand than Peace,
And a singe runs through lace and feather.
Melville is darkly cynical about war, about how it is linked to human society, and will not be eradicated. “War yet shall be.” Then comes a fateful “but.” The streaks of weather – literally war paint that ‘runs’ as the storms of the modern rain down on Indians on the warpath, metaphorically the rust on the iron plates of those ships and beyond the rust the erosion of the ‘hallowed’ traditions of warfare as mechanized combat increasingly replaces individual bravery – mark this battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack. Melville was deeply, deeply predictive when he wrote, “but the warriors/ Are now but operatives.” These ‘operatives,’ not only in his time but henceforward until our own, make war. In stanza one, the “painted pomp” was “laid aside.” In stanza two “the gaud/ Of glory” was replaced by “plain mechanic power.” In the magnificent third stanza, we have the stark reasoning: “No passion; all went on by crank,/ Pivot, and screw,/ And calculations of caloric.”
The poem thus prepares the reader for its conclusion, that war is now diminished. Its ending, having been so clearly foreshadowed, is a denouement. We have already recognized that the war paint of the past – individual heroism, man-to-man combat, courage – is “grimed.” Mechanization and machines have transformed war, so that “War’s made/ Less grand than Peace.”
This is the world that Melville foresees in this poem. Perhaps he even sees further than war, sees the spreading of industrialization and mechanization of all of human life and its practices. Moby-Dick, for instance, takes place on a human-labor-driven factory ship, and despite the very human links between Ishmael and Queequeg and the Satanic narcissism of its antihero Ahab, the ship Pequod sinks beneath the waters. Factories succeed individual manual labor and create their own ruination. An older world dies, and it is replaced, in the words of this poem, by “plain mechanic power.” Melville wrote his novel in ink, by hand, on paper; I wrote a half century ago on a mechanical typewriter on a paper known as Corrasable Bond; I am writing this on a computer, electronics replacing (as Melville could not foresee) even the mechanical, and the letters are now on a screen.
We have moved on, as the world moved on in the battle between those steam-driven ironclads. But Melville sees something has been lost. His is not, I think, mere nostalgia for a past of heroic warfare. It is an awareness that a “terrible beauty is born,” to cite Yeats, and that all has changed. Warfare and physical domination were cruel. But in our modern or post-modern world we live and make war on our fellow human beings differently: Concentration camps, atomic warfare, drone-directed bombings are all instances of a changed (industrial, technocratic) warfare that Melville understood was re-shaping our world. He saw the moment when the world changed very clearly, and conveyed it to us. So his poem stands, a cautionary warning, of what was happening in his time, and what so shapes our own.