Canto 31: Dirge

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Scott Norsworthy

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Nov 28, 2022, 9:19:56 AM11/28/22

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Nearing Jerusalem in the previous canto, young Clarel rode up on a double burial in the Valley of Jehoshaphat and was stunned to discover that one of the bodies was Ruth's, his intended. She had died in his absence, of fever or grief they told him. Wildly distraught, Clarel shoved one of the grave-diggers aside to place Ruth's hand outside of her cloak " so the bridegroom may not miss / To kiss it first, when soon he comes." This conceit of expected reunion in the afterworld recurs in lines 12-16 of Canto 31, Dirge.

https://poets.org/poem/clarel-dirge

In Clarel's voice, apparently, the speaker humbly begs Death to shelter his beloved in the palmy "moonlit land" of "silent meadows" where he hopes to join her. NOT, he pleads, in the underworld realm of Orcus. And not (at least, not before Clarel gets there) any paradise to which Azrael the Angel of Death may conduct the soul.

"On honey feed her, wild and holy;
Or trance her with thy choicest charm. ⁠
And if, ere yet the lover's free,
Some added dusk thy rule decree—
That shadow only let it be
Thrown in the moon-glade by the palm."

Melville's "Dirge" contains the only "genuine poetry" in all of CLAREL according to the reviewer in Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science.

Melville used the last stanza of Dirge in Cymbeline by William Collins for an epigraph to the story of Hunilla, The Encantadas Sketch Eighth. (Added in The Piazza Tales, not present in the 1854 magazine version.) Something about the mix of heartache and hope working in Melville's Dirge reminds me also of "Lake Charles" by the great Lucinda Williams:

"... Did you run about as far as you could go
down the Louisiana highway
across Lake Pontchartrain
Now your soul is in Lake Charles
no matter what they say.

Did an angel whisper in your ear
And hold you close, take away your fear
In those long last moments."