William-olated:
Signs to
Fairyland
in "Immolated"
...none that breatheth
living air doth know
Where is that happy land of Faery...
Of Faery Land, yet if he more inquire,
By certain signs, here set in sundry place,
He may it find....
―Edmund
Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book II.
HERMAN MELVILLE knew Spenser's Faerie Queene intimately, from
close reading that began in boyhood. His short fiction "The Piazza"
(1856) is framed as the narrator's "inland voyage to fairy-land" and
directly invokes Spenser as the first authority on fairy lore:
No more; I'll launch my yawl―ho,
cheerly, heart!―and push away for fairy-land,
for rainbow's end, in fairy-land. How to get to fairy-land, by what
road, I did not know,
nor could any one inform me, not even one Edmund Spenser, who had been
there―so he wrote me―further than that to reach fairy-land it must be
voyaged to, and with faith.
To find fairyland, you have to look for "certain signs" in
The Faerie Queene. "Immolated" is full of fairyland, which
the adventurous reader may find by paying attention to "certain signs" in Melville's poem.
Everyone agrees, "Immolated" concerns the fate of unknown poems by
Herman Melville. The relatively few commentators who mention it assume
that Melville at some time must have destroyed an unknown number of these
presumably youthful or "juvenile" productions. Taking immolated
to mean burned up, like a sacrifice at the altar, Jay Leyda
influentially proposed in the second volume of The Melville Log
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951) that in the summer of
1862 (perhaps), Melville may have disposed of some poems in "a prose and
poetry bonfire" at Arrowhead (653).
The word immolate primarily means "to sacrifice, offer in
sacrifice; to kill as a victim" (OED Online). Fire is one way, but not the
only way of killing a sacrificial victim. Figuratively, immolate can
also mean "to give up to destruction, or to severe suffering or loss, for
the sake of something else; to ‘sacrifice’" (OED Online). The basic
idea of making a sacrificial offering, literally or figuratively, is essential
for an understanding of "Immolated" because Melville's poem nowhere refers
or alludes to destruction by fire.
Nope, Melville's "Immolated" contains not a single incendiary image.
No flames or flammables, no cinders or embers, no charred remains, nothing
burned or scorched, no smoke, no hint of a July bonfire
anywhere:
The controlling metaphor in "Immolated" represents juvenile poems as
children. What happens to these figurative kids is not exactly
clear, but despite the implications of the title, the poet avoids stating
they have been destroyed or killed by any means. Rather, the children-poems have been
somehow saved, mysteriously "sealed" by their author "in a fate subdued."
The closest thing to a hint of death in the poem appears in the last
verse. Upon closer examination, however,
the image of night conforms perfectly with the main theme of preserving
children, keeping them safe in a loving and even maternal act.
Melville's image of children safely "snugged" in the arms of night
specifically evokes the allegorical representation of "Night" in the well-known bas-relief by Danish sculptor Bertel
Thorwaldsen. Here Night is personified as a fairy-like female angel whose
protective arms hold her children, the twin-brothers Sleep and Death.
Thorwaldsen was
a true fan of fairy tales, in particular those of his friend and countryman Hans Christian
Andersen.
Fairyland in "Immolated"
Children of my happier
prime...
By "children" Melville means "poems"; by
"happier prime" he means his childhood or youth. Implicitly he also
means the dreams and visions of youth, including visions of fairyland. The idea of
fairies as
metaphorical "children" of youth is exampled in Thomas Hood's letter to
Charles Lamb which introduces Hood's poem, “The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies.”
Hood's "Plea" is the first poem in the first volume of The Poetical
Works (Boston, 1860), a two-volume set that Melville owned and marked
(*Sealts No. 279). *Here and throughout, citations of Sealts refer
to Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville's Reading (Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 1988). In his dedication to Lamb, Hood explains the aim
of "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies" as follows:
It is my
design, in the following Poem, to celebrate, by an allegory, that
immortality which Shakespeare has conferred on the Fairy mythology by his
Midsummer Nights Dream. But for him,
those pretty children of our
childhood would leave barely their names to our maturer years; they
belong, as mites upon the plum, to the bloom of fancy, a thing generally
too frail and beautiful to withstand the rude handling of time: but the
Poet has made this most perishable part of the mind’s creation equal to
the most enduring…
Hood's association of children and fairy fantasies potentially explains much that is
otherwise mysterious in Melville's "Immolated." The poet-problem
at hand, the task that Hood undertakes and Shakespeare achieved, is to
immortalize the fragile dreams of youth in poetry. Melville's speaker in
"Immolated" addresses his juvenile verses as figurative "children."
Hood understands "children of our childhood" more specifically as fairies
who can only survive and endure over time in fairy literature. His letter to Lamb
thus offers a context for understanding how insubstantial, evanescent creatures of
fancy―the poetic "children" of Melville's childhood or
"happier prime"―might be saved from perishing, like Titania and
Oberon in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, through the poetry of fairyland.
When One yet lived with me,
and threw
Her rainbow over life and time,
Even Hope, my bride, and mother to you!
What issues from the union, the metaphorical marriage, of Youth and Hope?
Fairy-land! Fairy-land!
Childhood’s visions fade,
Fairer—frailer—dreams of bliss
Youth and hope have made [Poems by Marianne Pennington
(Hertford, 1847)]
Melville may never have read Marianne Pennington, but he surely knew
with Tom Moore that Hope is a Fairy:
And then,
that Hope, that
fairy Hope,
Oh! she awakened such happy dreams,
And gave my soul such tempting scope
For all its dearest, fondest schemes… (Moore, “Epistle I. To Lord
Viscount Strangford”)
The give-away in "Immolated" is the rainbow, a sure sign to fairyland. Melville
well understood the fabled association. As mentioned above, in "The Piazza"
he sets out "for rainbow's end, in fairy-land." Park
Benjamin makes the popular connection in a sonnet printed in the same
issue of Harper's (Sept. 1854) with Melville's short story "The
Fiddler":
There once I wandered gaily,
hand in hand,
With the companions of my happy spring;
It was
Life’s realm of Fairy, rainbow-spanned
Park Benjamin speaks of childhood as his
"happy spring," a figure that closely resembles Melville's
metaphor of childhood as his "happier
prime" (originally "Tempe prime" in the manuscript now at
Harvard).
As Benjamin knew―and Melville, too―the
native turf of youth is "Life's realm of Fairy."
In Melville's "Immolated," Hope's "rainbow over life and time" spans
Fairyland.
O,
nurtured in sweet pastoral air
In the guise of "Geoffrey Crayon," Washington Irving
associated "sweet pastoral images" with fairy lore in his chapter on
"Popular Superstitions" in Bracebridge Hall:
When I first found myself among English scenery, I
was continually reminded of the
sweet pastoral images
which distinguish their fairy
mythology.
Melville had Bracebridge Hall in a two-volume set of Washington Irving's
Works (Sealts No. 292a), presented to him by his friend Richard
Lathers on June 7, 1853 [See Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A
Biography, 2 vols. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1996 and 2002), 2.156-57.]
And fed on flowers and light and dew
Of morning meadows―
All commonly associated in
literature and legend with fairyland. Thomas Hood's "Plea of the
Midsummer Fairies," cited above, depicts fairies, sprites, and elves as
"the pretty genii
of the flow’rs, / Daintily fed with honey and pure dew—."
Writing on "Fairy Superstition," Sir Walter Scott
also relates the refined dietary habits of elves and kindred creatures.
Scott links fairies with the Peris of Persian
folklore who
hover in the
balmy clouds, live in the colours of the rainbow, and, as the exquisite
purity of their natures rejects all nourishment grosser than the odours of
flowers, they subsist by inhaling the fragrance of the Jessamine and
rose. Though their existence is not commensurate with the bounds of human
life, they are not exempted from the common fate of mortals.—
Charmed visions of fairyland
typically feature meads, flowers, and dew, as in the anonymous Elizabethan
play The Wisdom of Dr. Dodypoll:
'Twas I that
led you thro' the painted meads,
Where the light fairies danced upon the flowers,
Ranging on every leaf an orient pearl...
Excerpts from "Dr. Dodypol"
(including the enchanting view of fairyland above) are included in book
that Melville owned, Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets
(Sealts No. 318).
Keats in "Endymion" paints a morning scene in which
...the dew
Had taken fairy fantasies to strew
Daisies upon the sacred sward...
aural
and alphabetical signs to fairyland
or land of faery / faerie...
O, nurtured in sweet pastoraL air,
and fed on fLowers
and Light and dew
And Fed on Flowers and light and dew
Of morning meadows―spare, Ah, spare
Reproach; spare, and upbraid me not
That, Yielding scarce to reckless mood,
But jealous of your future lot,
Melville's word jealous
associates the speaker of "Immolated" with "jealous Oberon" in
Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (2.1):
For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,
Because that she as her attendant hath
A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king.
She never had so sweet a changeling;
And jealous
Oberon would have the child
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild;
But she perforce withholds the loved boy,
Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her joy...
TITANIA. What,
jealous Oberon! Fairies,
skip hence;
Oberon jealously covets Titania's
"changeling," a child stolen from mortals and transported to fairyland.
The changeling motif in "Immolated" is poetically fitting, complementing
the basic metaphor of fairy fictions as children of one's youth.
Walter Scott in his essay on "Fairy Superstition" noted that
"the
abstraction of children
seems to have been chiefly ascribed to the elves, or Fairies." Scott
viewed this "practice of carrying away, and exchanging, children" as "the
most formidable attribute" of elves or fairies.
Fairies are popularly believed to leave a troublesome imp or "idiot" in
place of the stolen child, so the term "changeling" can apply to either
the abducted child or its substitute, as commentators on Shakespeare's
usage have long affirmed. The most famous literary example of a
changeling is probably the Red Cross Knight in Spenser's Faerie Queene,
said to have been kidnapped and transported to fairyland:
―A Fairy thee
unweeting reft;
There as thou slepst in tender swadling band,
And her base elfin brood there for thee left:
Such men do changelings call, so chang’d by Fairies' theft.
(Book I, Canto 10)
I sealed you in a fate subdued.
Hard
words to decipher, admittedly. But Melville says "sealed" not killed―and
further on, "saved" not destroyed. He is continuing here to address
his metaphorical "children," the poetic fancies of his youth. In
view of the fairyland imagery associated with these figurative children,
and recalling Thomas Hood's Shakespearian project of immortalizing
otherwise short-lived fairy fantasies of youth in poetry, to be "sealed"
in "a fate subdued" means I think to be impressed―that
is, printed―and lovingly
if misleadingly
preserved in
a book of poems relating to fairyland.
Fate =
Fairy. A leading
nineteenth-century authority, Thomas Keightly, traced the origin of the
word fairy to its root in the Latin word for fate, fatum.
[See Keightly's Fairy Mythology (London: H. G. Bohn, 1850), p. 5.]
The OED online confirms that the English word fate ultimately
derives from Latin fatum, the doom pronounced by the gods
(literally "that which has been spoken"). The singular form fata
meaning "fairy" is related through popular usage to the Latin plural,
fata. The American Cyclopædia, synthesizing a number of
authorities including Keightly's Fairy Mythology and Sir Walter Scott's "Essay
on the Fairy Superstition," also gives the etymological tie between
fairies and the Latin for fate:
FAIRIES....The origin of the word is
obscure, but it is probably related to the Latin fata (pl. of
fatum), which is the Italian (sing.) for fairy.
Youthful fancies "in a
fate subdued" are abducted like changeling children and withdrawn to the land of faery,
fairyland. "[T]oo frail and beautiful," as Thomas Hood wrote, to
survive "rude handling," the evanescent dreams of youth usually disappear
in the natural course of things, robbed by practical experience of the
world and neglected through conformity to conventional expectations (of
the "Unanimous Mediocrity," in Melville's terms). Nevertheless, the dreams
of youth, otherwise subject to "theft," "ignoring," and "despite" in
adulthood, are in Melville's "Immolated" sweetly "saved" in the tangible
form of poems.
Rest therefore, free from all despite,
The poet's saving act of making poems is again
likened to the abduction of children by fairies. Melville's
parting assurance that lovely visions of childhood have been made "free
from all despite" echoes a much-quoted passage in John Fletcher's The
Faithful Shepherdess (1.2), describing a magical brook in which the
fairies dunk their changelings and thereby immortalize them:
A virtuous
well, about whose flowery banks
The nimble-footed Fairies dance their rounds,
By the pale moon-shine, dipping oftentimes
Their stolen children, so to make them
free
From dying flesh, and dull mortality.
Snugged in the arms of comfortable night.
But that title! Something must be immolated in "Immolated."
What in Melville's poem is killed or offered as a sacrifice, if not the
metaphorical children of youth?
Not to worry, the children are safe: the poet sacrifices his own identity and is
therefore the victim of self-immolation.
Some unknown and maybe unknowable connection between Herman Melville
and William Gibson is suggested in close
textual parallels between
certain of their poems, suggestive links in poems by Gibson to
Melville's marginalia, and also by identifiable correspondences between
Italianate poems by Gibson and
Melville's 1856-57 Mediterranean journal.
Hypothetically, then, some or most or all of the poems in Gibson's A
Vision of Faery Land and Other Poems (Boston: James Munroe and
Company, 1853) may have been composed by Melville. Melville's hand
in the writing of poems eventually published in Gibson's Vision of
Faery Land would nicely explain the pervasive fairyland imagery in
"Immolated." A covert partnership with Gibson would also be
consistent with the anagram in the final line for "Lt. Commander Gibson
USN":
Snugged
in the arms of comfortable night.
[USN]
Snugged
in
the arms
of comfortable
night.
[GIBSON]
Snugged
in
the arms
of comfortable
night. [COMMANDER]
Snugged in the arms
of comfortable
night.
[Lt.]
Perhaps Melville saved his childhood visions by hiding them in the
poems of Gibson's Faery Land. Having disclosed their fate
through imagery and sound, Melville effectively seals the delivery of
his poetic children to fairyland by signing the name and naval rank of
their putative author in the last line.
Melville himself is
William-olated in "Immolated."
