There is something about Herman Melville’s sentences that fascinates me. They wind in and around and back on themselves in a sort of convoluted meandering that somehow all makes sense in the end. (And he announces to the reader when he’s about to go on a tangent, which always makes me chuckle and used to make my students groan.) This syntactical skill is on full display in Moby Dick, a novel I have re-read at least once a year nearly every year since Sister Angele assigned it as summer reading between my junior and senior years of high school. But lately I’ve been drawn back to another favorite Melville tale, Billy Budd, Sailor.
Part of what enchants me about Billy Budd, Sailor is the fact that it was released after Melville’s death, without his approval of its final form or his ability to respond to discourse. That this last novel is one of his most debated—is it about law versus morality? Shame and jealousy? Allegory for Christ, Satan, and God? Commentary on fatal flaws of nature? Suppressed sexuality? The conflagration of political circumstance and personal action? Or perhaps all of the above?—makes it all the more intriguing to me.
On my most current re-read, I began to pull phrases I felt were beautiful in terms of sound or evocative in their juxtaposition: spontaneous homage; lesser lights; irrepressible guest; the lily suppressed; knocker of a good-man’s door; elemental uproar. I also felt much more strongly the underlying pull that there was something unwritten between Billy and his eventual nemesis, Claggart. When I used to teach the novel to advanced eighth graders studying American Lit, Chapter 17 would always elicit the response, “It sounds like Claggart is in love with Billy and is trying SO HARD not to be.” Even as fourteen-year-olds, they saw things they understood - the mixed emotions and longing when seeing the object of affection in the company of others, the long happy gaze when able to observe at leisure, the quick move to frustration and anger when an encounter happens that is abrupt or unexpected. The fact that this could be a love story at its heart (unrequited or suppressed or forbidden or fatherly or brotherly) opened up some possibilities for me.
So, as I now have a collection of phrases and language as a starting point for a new series of poems, I have several options for how to use it:
Write persona poems that retell the story as if Billy and Claggart have a history that is untold in the current novel and yet leads to the known events.
Write love poems using the language that allude to the novel without direct reference.
Write poems completely unrelated to the novel.
If one of these is more appealing or interesting than the others to you as a reader, let me know. Right now, I have one of each type of poem, so the project could go in any direction.
I’ll set sail and see where the wind takes me.
Prompt:
Using a favorite novel that is in the public domain, pull words and phrases that you find beautiful and repurpose them in a new piece.
OR
Use the title of this post (the way the forecastleman greets Billy) as inspiration to address an abstract concept. Ah, is it you, beauty? What’s up, Death?
Ah, is it you, Beauty?
The first 2 sentences sound like me except for the “making sense” part.
The first option, with the persona poems, seems interesting to pursue. I never read any Melville but I get the vibe you’re projecting, and I’m gonna check out the book.