Why Read Moby-Dick

of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. . . . Stubb scattered the dead ashes [of his pipe] over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.”
    In his detailed descriptions of the whale’s anatomy, Melville is carefully, meticulously preparing us for the novel’s climax. In the chapter titled “The Battering-Ram,” Ishmael anatomizes the “compacted collectedness” of the sperm whale’s block-shaped head. It is, he tells us, “a dead, blind wall, . . . [an] enormous boneless mass . . . as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with horses’ hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it.” In addition to this mysterious “wad” of insensitivity, we are introduced to the whale’s tiny and “lashless eye, which you would fancy to be a young colt’s eye; so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the head.” The spout hole is “countersunk into the summit of the whale’s head” so that “even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary’s in the desert; even then, the whale always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with rain.” The whale’s tail is “a dense webbed bed of welded sinews . . . knit over with a warp and woof of muscular fibres and filaments . . . so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it . . . where infantileness of ease undulates through a Titanism of power.”
    Reading Moby-Dick, we are in the presence of a writer who spent several impressionable years on a whaleship, internalized everything he saw, and seven or so years later, after internalizing Shakespeare, Hawthorne, the Bible, and much more, found the voice and the method that enabled him to broadcast his youthful experiences into the future. And this, ultimately, is where the great, unmatched potency of Moby-Dick, the novel, resides. It comes from an author who not only was there but possessed the capacious and impressionable soul required to appreciate the wonder of what he was seeing. At one point, Ishmael draws our attention to the majestic head of the sperm whale: “[G]azing on it . . . ,” he insists, “you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature.... If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.”
    By the last third of the novel, we know all there is to know about the anatomy of the whale and the specifics of killing a whale; we have also come to appreciate the whale’s awe-inspiring mystery and beauty. As a consequence, Melville is free to describe the final clash between Ahab and Moby Dick with the unapologetic specificity required to make an otherwise improbable and overwrought confrontation seem astonishingly real.

15
    Poetry
    M oby-Dick is a novel, but it is also a book of poetry.
    The beauty of Melville’s sentences is such that it sometimes takes me five minutes or more to make my way through a single page as I reread the words aloud, feeling the rhythms, the shrewdly hidden rhymes, and the miraculous way he manages consonants and vowels. Take, for example, this passage from chapter 51, “The Spirit-Spout,” which picks up with the Pequod just south of St. Helena: “while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.”
    Good poetry is not all about lush and gorgeous words. It’s about creating an emblematic and surprising scene that opens up new worlds. When the Pequod meets the whaleship Albatross, the men at the