The Stone Fleet

An Old Sailor's Lament
December, 1861

I have a feeling for those ships,
Each worn and ancient one,
With great bluff bows, and broad in the beam:
Ay, it was unkindly done.
    But so they serve the Obsolete--
    Even so, Stone Fleet!

You'll say I'm doting; do you think
I scudded round the Horn in one--
The Tenedos, a glorious
Good old craft as ever run--
    Sunk (how all unmeet!)
    With the Old Stone Fleet.

An India ship of fame was she,
Spices and shawls and fans she bore;
A whaler when the wrinkles came--
Turned off! till, spent and poor,
    Her bones were sold (escheat)!
    Ah! Stone Fleet.

Four were erst patrician keels
(Names attest what families be),
The Kensington, and Richmond too,
Leonidas, and Lee:
    But now they have their seat
    With the Old Stone Fleet.

To scuttle them--a pirate deed--
Sack them, and dismast;
They sunk so slow, they died so hard,
But gurgling dropped at last.
    Their ghosts in gales repeat
    Woe's us, Stone Fleet!

And all for naught. The waters pass--
Currents will have their way;
Nature is nobody's ally; 'tis well;
The harbor is bettered--will stay.
    A failure, and complete,
    Was your Old Stone Fleet.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. His most famous work, Moby-Dick, was published in 1851 and initially was not a commercial success. Melville's writing draws on his experiences at sea, philosophical musings, and criticisms of society. While he died in relative obscurity, his reputation grew significantly in the 20th century, and he is now considered one of America’s greatest writers. Melville’s other works include Typee, White-Jacket, and Billy Budd.

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The Battle for the Bay.

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The Enviable Isles

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A Canticle: Significant of the national exaltation of enthusiasm at the close of the War.

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The Temeraire

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John Marr And Other Sailors

Since as in night's deck-watch ye show,
Why, lads, so silent here to me,
Your watchmate of times long ago?
Once, for all the darkling sea,
You your voices raised how clearly,
Striking in when tempest sung;
Hoisting up the storm-sail cheerly,
Life is storm--let storm! you rung.
Taking things as fated merely,
Childlike though the world ye spanned;
Nor holding unto life too dearly,
Ye who held your lives in hand--
Skimmers, who on oceans four
Petrels were, and larks ashore.

O, not from memory lightly flung,
Forgot, like strains no more availing,
The heart to music haughtier strung;
Nay, frequent near me, never staleing,
Whose good feeling kept ye young.
Like tides that enter creek or stream,
Ye come, ye visit me, or seem
Swim...

Herman Melville

The Battle for the Bay.

(August, 1864.)


O mystery of noble hearts,
To whom mysterious seas have been
In midnight watches, lonely calm and storm,
A stern, sad disciple,
And rooted out the false and vain,
And chastened them to aptness for
Devotion and the deeds of war,
And death which smiles and cheers in spite of pain.

Beyond the bar the land-wind dies,
The prows becharmed at anchor swim:
A summer night; the stars withdrawn look down -
Fair eve of battle grim.
The sentries pace, bonetas glide;
Below, the sleeping sailor swing,
And it their dreams to quarters spring,
Or cheer their flag, or breast a stormy tide.

But drums are beat: Up anchor all!
The triple lines steam slowly on;
Day breaks, and through the sweep of decks each man
Stan...

Herman Melville

The Aeolian Harp

At The Surf Inn

List the harp in window wailing
Stirred by fitful gales from sea:
Shrieking up in mad crescendo--
Dying down in plaintive key!

Listen: less a strain ideal
Than Ariel's rendering of the Real.
What that Real is, let hint
A picture stamped in memory's mint.

Braced well up, with beams aslant,
Betwixt the continents sails the Phocion,
For Baltimore bound from Alicant.
Blue breezy skies white fleeces fleck
Over the chill blue white-capped ocean:
From yard-arm comes--"Wreck ho, a wreck!"

Dismasted and adrift,
Longtime a thing forsaken;
Overwashed by every wave
Like the slumbering kraken;
Heedless if the billow roar,
Oblivious of the lull,
Leagues and leagues from shoal or shore,
It sw...

Herman Melville

The Haglets

By chapel bare, with walls sea-beat
The lichened urns in wilds are lost
About a carved memorial stone
That shows, decayed and coral-mossed,
A form recumbent, swords at feet,
Trophies at head, and kelp for a winding-sheet.

I invoke thy ghost, neglected fane,
Washed by the waters' long lament;
I adjure the recumbent effigy
To tell the cenotaph's intent--
Reveal why fagotted swords are at feet,
Why trophies appear and weeds are the winding-sheet.

By open ports the Admiral sits,
And shares repose with guns that tell
Of power that smote the arm'd Plate Fleet
Whose sinking flag-ship's colors fell;
But over the Admiral floats in light
His squadron's flag, the red-cross Flag of the White.

The eddying waters whirl astern,
The prow, a se...

Herman Melville

The Temeraire

Supposed to have been suggested to an Englishman of the old order by the fight of the Monitor and Merrimac

The gloomy hulls in armor grim,
Like clouds o'er moors have met,
And prove that oak, and iron, and man
Are tough in fibre yet.

But Splendors wane. The sea-fight yields
No front of old display;
The garniture, emblazonment,
And heraldry all decay.

Towering afar in parting light,
The fleets like Albion's forelands shine--
The full-sailed fleets, the shrouded show
Of Ships-of-the-Line.

The fighting Temeraire,
    Built of a thousand trees,
Lunging out her lightnings,
    And beetling o'er the seas--
O Ship, how brave and fair,
    That fought so oft and well,

On open decks you manned the gun Armorial....

Herman Melville

Pebbles

I
Though the Clerk of the Weather insist,
And lay down the weather-law,
Pintado and gannet they wist
That the winds blow whither they list
In tempest or flaw.

II
Old are the creeds, but stale the schools,
Revamped as the mode may veer,
But Orm from the schools to the beaches strays
And, finding a Conch hoar with time, he delays
And reverent lifts it to ear.
That Voice, pitched in far monotone,
Shall it swerve? shall it deviate ever?
The Seas have inspired it, and Truth--
Truth, varying from sameness never.

III
In hollows of the liquid hills
Where the long Blue Ridges run,
The flattery of no echo thrills,
For echo the seas have none;
Nor aught that gives man back man's strain--
The hope of his heart, the dream in his br...

Herman Melville