Read Online Why Read Moby-Dick by Nathaniel Philbrick - Free Book Online Page A

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 mastheads find themselves passing each other silently in the sky: “Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.”
    Good poetry also directs our attention to the most ordinary of human experiences. I know that I cannot go to bed on a cold winter night without thinking of Ishmael’s lyrical aside in chapter 11, “Nightgown,” about the benefits of sleeping in an unheated room. Not only does he provide some very practical advice; he delivers a kind of poetics of physical sensation that culminates in a quietly stunning prose haiku. “[T]o enjoy bodily warmth,” Ishmael explains, “some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if... the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this