SATURDAY - MCCLELLAN POETRY

Herman Melville is widely believed to have based his Civil War poetry on readings. And in all the poems and literature of McClellan's Battle of Malvern Hill, only in Melville are the elm trees prominent.

Critic Frank L. Day suggests this is connects the poem to a contemporary book by Frank Moore, The Rebellion Record: a diary of American events, with documents, narratives, illustrative incidents, poetry, etc. (New-York G.P. Putnam 1861):

"The house at Malvern Hill is a quaint old structure... A fine grove of ancient elms embowers the lawn in a grateful shade..."

A recent book, The Civil War World of Herman Melville, argues that Melville's inspirations were wider than just his readings.

Malvern Hill is another selection from Melville's Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War and you can read some of the contemporary criticism here. The comment in the New York Nation that "Nature did not make him a poet. His pages contain at best little more than the rough ore of poetry," is roughly what Edmund Wilson had to say of his work eighty years later.

But there are some Kiplingesque turns here, despite the naturalism, first in imagery:
Does the elm wood
Recall the haggard beards of blood?

and then in meter and imagery:
Reverse we proved was not defeat;
But ah, the sod what thousands meet—!

Melville was experimenting. The results are interesting.

Malvern Hill
(July, 1862)

Ye elms that wave on Malvern Hill
In prime of morn and May,
Recall ye how McClellan's men
Here stood at bay?
While deep within yon forest dim
Our rigid comrades lay—
Some with the cartridge in their mouth,
Others with fixed arms lifted South—
Invoking so
The cypress glades? Ah wilds of woe!

The spires of Richmond, late beheld
Through rifts in musket-haze,
Were closed from view in clouds of dust
On leaf-walled ways,
Where streamed our wagons in caravan;
And the Seven Nights and Days
Of march and fast, retreat and fight,
Pinched our grimed faces to ghastly plight—
Does the elm wood
Recall the haggard beards of blood?

The battle-smoked flag, with stars eclipsed,
we followed (it never fell!)—
In silence husbanded our strength—
Received their yell;
Till on this slope we patient turned
With cannon ordered well;
Reverse we proved was not defeat;
But ah, the sod what thousands meet—!
Does Malvern Wood
Bethink itself, and muse and brood?

We elms of Malvern Hill
remember every thing;
But sap the twig will fill:
Wag the world how it will,
Leaves must be green in Spring.