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By Root 7717 0

with Grant and to join a three-day excursion with a band of soldiers in search of Confederate partisan John Mosby. By the time of the southern surrender the following spring, Melville was launched on a new literary venture in an unfamiliar form. War would be his subject, and poetry his genre. His Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, published in 1866, presents the conflict in a collection of glimpses and fragments, not in the novelistic form of his most important earlier work. The choice reflected his judgment that “none can narrate that strife,” and even “entangled rhyme / But hints at the maze of war.” Melville recognized the momentousness of the nation’s experience; the conflict had been “an upheaval affecting the basis of things,” and those things included literary form and language as well as human purposes and values.66

The poems are arranged in a chronology, not of their composition but of the war itself, beginning with John Brown and the “Conflict of Convictions” that resulted in secession and continuing through Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Antietam, Stones River, Gettysburg, Chattanooga, the Wilderness, the March to the Sea, the fall of Richmond, and the surrender at Appomattox. The volume opens with the “expectancy” of ignorant youth marching joyously off to battle. But Melville delineates the dashing of these hopes, the harsh education of these young who “perish, enlightened by the vollied glare.” As it does for Bierce, death comes with the irony of surprise. A glorious adventure undertaken with the enthusiasm and pleasure of “a berrying party” becomes a burying party of a quite different sort. War’s young soldiers had not “dreamed what death was—thought it mere / Sliding into some vernal sphere.” In their anticipations they had “leaped the grief” of war, but battle and Melville restore it.67

At the heart of Melville’s poetic inquiry rests “the riddle of death,” a question with which he had been personally much concerned before war propelled it to the center of national consciousness. Like so many other Americans of his era, Melville struggled to overcome his doubts about Christian doctrine in order to find a plausible foundation for reassuring faith in immortality. His friend Nathaniel Hawthorne had reported in 1856 that Melville “can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief,” but had out of frustration with his indecision “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated.” The issue remained far from settled for Melville, however, when the outbreak of war gave death new prominence in both private and public life. Literary critic Daniel Aaron has judged Battle-Pieces to be Melville’s continuing inquiry into this question, “a sustained debate between belief and disbelief.”68

Annihilation took on a different meaning after 1861, and Melville rendered the texture of war’s destructiveness unblinkingly: the soldiers in the Wilderness meet “skull after skull” and green and rotting “shoes full of bones,” the remains of the dead still unburied from the previous year’s campaigns. “Few burial rites shall be,” as even the dignifying rituals of death are abandoned to the grim necessities of military slaughter. Glory, plumes, sashes, banners have become irrelevant; men are but operatives, cogs in a machinery of destruction, for war itself has been modernized and industrialized, as the ascendancy and “anvil-din” of the war’s ironclad warships vividly symbolize.

No passion; all went on by crank,

Pivot and screw,

And calculations of caloric.69

Death itself becomes war’s end, the product of its industrialized machinery; there is no more transcendent or glorious purpose; northerners and southerners lie mingled together, “fame or country least their care.” But they now understand what in their youthful zeal for battle they did not—“What like a bullet can undeceive!”—for the pieties and pomposities of war have dissolved. The dead have discovered as well the answer to the riddle that Melville cannot know, the riddle “of which the slain / Sole solvers are.” Beginning in such innocence, they are brought by war