Melville Tried Poetry After His Fiction's Darkest Days

After his initial failure as a commercial novelist, "American legend to be" Herman Melville took a stab at poetry (but unfortunately failed at that too). Via Literary Hub:

When Herman Melville died, on September 28th, 1891, 125 years ago, he was still fiddling around with a small, sweet poem called “The Chipmunk:”

Stock-still I stand,
And him I see
Prying, peeping
From Beech-tree;
Crickling, crackling
Gleefully!

Having failed commercially as a novelist, he had spent the last 25 years of his life out of the public eye, and he had written poetry nearly every day. Mostly, his verse was tortured and cramped, and he often drew his themes from unlikely sources: ancient Greece and Rome, the Holy Land, myths, gods, and temple architecture. The scholar and Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco calls his poetry “gnomic,” and it contains none of the startling flights of fancy that make his best prose so engaging; but at the very end of his life, he turned his attention to homelier subjects, and his verse loosened up a bit and became more whimsical.

Through an orchard I follow
Two children in glee.
From an apple-tree’s hollow
They startle the bee.

Melville was 72 when he died in Manhattan, after a series of increasingly debilitating colds and viruses. He was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, where he joined his older son Malcolm, who had shot himself just after the Civil War, and his younger son Stanwix, who had died of tuberculosis in 1886. Woodlawn had been established during the Civil War and was built on the site of an important Revolutionary War fortification constructed by George Washington’s men, and the connection to both his sons and the struggles that had shaped his country would have appealed to Melville. Woodlawn was also the place where the most prestigious writers and businessmen were buried at the time, a fact that would not have been lost on the Melville family, though Melville himself died essentially anonymous.

Continue at Literary Hub.