Canto 33: Easter

[Scott Norsworthy]

In "Passion Week' the sorrows of Clarel, bereft and depressed, aligned in liturgical time with the sufferings of Christ from Gethsemane to the Crucifixion at Calvary. Fittingly, the canto ended in figurative Hell with Clarel's ghostly vision on Good Friday.

Canto 33 opens with a paraphrase of Luke 24.7, affirming IN ALL CAPS the fulfillment of Scripture on Easter morning:

BUT ON THE THIRD DAY CHRIST AROSE

https://books.google.com/books?id=BvRDAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA565&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

Medieval poets told of the Harrowing of Hell when Jesus, after the Crucifixion, rescued Adam and Eve from the Devil. But Melville has little to say here about Holy Saturday. 

Melville does tell us that Easter this year happens to fall on the same day for Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox believers (here labeled "schismatics").

And when the day,
The Easter, falls in calendar
The same to Latin and the array
Of all schismatics from afar—
Armenians, Greeks from many a shore—
Syrians, Copts—profusely pour
The hymns: 'tis like the choric gush
Of torrents Alpine when they rush
To swell the anthem of the spring.
That year was now.
https://poets.org/poem/clarel-easter

Looks like 1876 (when CLAREL was first published) was such a year. As were 1862, 1865, 1868 and 1871. http://5ko.free.fr/en/easter.php?y=19

Back at Mar Saba Melville likewise referred to Greeks as "schismatic," in connection with the celebration of Easter. But here he forgoes the criticism of "fraudful" religious ceremonies leveled in Part 3 Canto 16, The Easter Fire. Religious rites of Spring now receive a more sympathetic treatment as exhilarating, joyful and irrepressibly natural. Easter hymns roll like mountain rivers, "torrents Alpine." Priests in their gemmed robes "like birds Brazilian shine." Nature brings Best from Worst. And the Best is yet to come, symbolized in the beautiful anemones that will bloom later on in "maturer May." 

Melville references the anticipated May flowers in Christian terms as "Christ's-Blood-Drops." Being Melville, he goes on to figure seasonal fertility in pre-Christian terms, too, as "Thammuz' spring in Thammuz' glade." 

"Tammuz, Sumerian Dumuzi, in Mesopotamian religion, god of fertility embodying the powers for new life in nature in the spring."

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tammuz-Mesopotamian-god

The excellent discussion in the back of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of CLAREL cross-references the Osiris-Christ parallel in Part 1 Canto 31, and helpfully cites similar "classical-Christian contrasts" elsewhere in the poem. Melville's making Thammuz' realm a "glade" reminds me of the pagan imagery we found in previous cantos--the "Druid grove" associated with Ungar and the ancient "grove of Daphne" at Antioch, introducing the Prodigal Lyonese.

Nature beckons, whether figured as gorgeous mayflowers or pagan playground. Nevertheless, Clarel remains heartbroken. His mind is still on Ruth and her burial in "Joel's glen" (so Jehoshaphat, alluding to the Valley of Judgment or Decision described by the prophet Joel). There, to Clarel,  the colorful outfits worn by worshippers on Easter look like "cherries dropped on pall," the cloth that covers a coffin. Here again, as in the Valley of Decision canto, Melville's imagery serves I think to intensify the pathos in Clarel's experience of grief. In The Mystery of Iniquity (University Press of Kentucky, 1972) William Shurr found the cherry-tree passage "cynical" where I would say "pathetic." 

Clarel will not be consoled, at least not yet. He finds little to no comfort in Nature, through the cyclical return of Spring, or Religion, through the celebration of Christ's resurrection at Easter. 

"... Christ is arisen:

But Ruth, may Ruth so burst the prison?" 

After Easter, with most of the pilgrims gone, Jerusalem looks like an empty church:

"... some kirk on week-day lone,

On whose void benches broodeth still

The brown light from November hill."