Now this is just awesome! I’m currently reading The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs, subtitled One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World [by reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica]. I’m quite enjoying the book. In the section about Nathanial Hawthorne, I read about the author’s short-lived friendship with Herman Melville (it would seem that both writers were drama queens). Jacobs mentioned that Melville had written a poem about Hawthorne after the end of their friendship. I was having trouble locating such a poem (without the title) online, though it is suspected that Monody is about Hawthorne. In my search, however, I stumbed across this poem, which is actually about a Parrott cannon, invented by an ancestor of mine! The cannon is now in Trenton, NJ, and I’ve seen it! The cannon was part of the siege of Charleston and the poem is not very favorable, but what can you say about a siege that’s good? I just get excited whenever the family history is mentioned…
The Swamp Angel
By Herman Melville
There is a coal-black Angel
With a thick Afric lip,
And he dwells (like the hunted and harried)
In a swamp where the green frogs dip.
But his face is against a City
Which is over a bay of the sea,
And he breathes with a breath that is blastment,
And dooms by a far decree.
By night there is fear in the City,
Through the darkness a star soareth on;
There’s a scream that screams up to the zenith,
Then the poise of a meteor lone—
Lighting far the pale fright of the faces,
And downward the coming is seen;
Then the rush, and the burst, and the havoc,
And wails and shrieks between.
It comes like the thief in the gloaming;
It comes, and none may foretell
The place of the coming—the glaring;
They live in a sleepless spell
That wizens, and withers, and whitens;
It ages the young, and the bloom
Of the maiden is ashes of roses—
The Swamp Angel broods in his gloom.
Swift is his messengers’ going,
But slowly he saps their halls,
As if by delay deluding.
They move from their crumbling walls
Farther and farther away;
But the Angel sends after and after,
By night with the flame of his ray—
By night with the voice of his screaming—
Sends after them, stone by stone,
And farther walls fall, farther portals,
And weed follows weed through the Town.
Is this the proud City? the scorner
Which never would yield the ground?
Which mocked at the coal-black Angel?
The cup of despair goes round.
Vainly she calls upon Michael
(The white man’s seraph was he),
For Michael has fled from his tower
To the Angel over the sea.
Who weeps for the woeful City
Let him weep for our guilty kind;
Who joys at her wild despairing—
Christ, the Forgiver, convert his mind.
