J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

Abstract:

Part 2 of Herman Melville's centenary epic, "The Wilderness," opens with a truncated sonnet of thirteen lines, a poem embedded within Melville's larger poetic project that signals the dominant theme of this second movement and the epic as a whole: incompletion. The sonnet calls attention to its own imperfection in the final line, describing human life, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Clarel itself as "unfulfilled romance." Through death and desertion, Melville's wilderness culls the troop of pilgrims from a band of sixteen to a party of twelve. After three of the pilgrims flee, readers, too, are invited to abandon their journey through the poem: "They fled. And thou? The way is dun; / Why further follow the Emir's son?" Melville's structural poetics reflect this thematic interest in incompletion; Part 2 begins with a truncated sonnet and it ends abruptly after canto 39. The biblical children of Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years before entering the promised land of Canaan, but the reader's sojourn in the wilderness is cut short, before a fortieth canto. In The Wilderness Melville invites his readers to consider incompletion as both poetic end and means, the inescapable human condition in mortality.