The Civil War
The poems for which Melville is likely most famous are contained in his collection Battle Pieces. Melville was a staunch defender of the Union as well as a supporter of the abolition of slavery, but his poems are powerful indictments of the actuality of war. While it is clear that his sympathies lie with the blue rather than the grey, he views all the dead and dying and fighting soldiers as, above all else, Americans. The verse of Melville puts the Civil War into context by offering political analysis alongside heart-rending description of the battlefield and by fostering a humanist conscience alongside the mythic heroism of individuals on both sides of the conflict.
Sailors
One should only expect that the poetry of the man who wrote Moby-Dick, Typee, and Billy Budd would take on the life of the man who is drawn by the sea as a recurring motif. Over the course of dozens of poems, Melville explores myriad facets of the life of the seaman. His collection titled John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces is, as the title indicates, devoted to this them. Sailors also pop up frequently as characters in the midst of battle in his collection of Civil War poetry as well, however.
Religion
Interestingly, for a man not exactly known as one of America’s more religiously inclined novelists, Herman Melville expends considerable artistic energy on the subject of religion. “Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land” makes its focus on religious themes more than obvious in the title, but that but the focus on this theme is magnified exponentially when one realizes that the poem spans almost 18,000 lines. Melville’s treatment of religion is every bit as complex in this poem the language required to produce such a mammoth effort. Indeed, the religious themes covered by Melville in verse is almost certainly his most complex. For instance, he reveals an interest in Gnosticism with “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century while “The New Zealot of the Sun” presents a history of religion from pre-Christian paganism onward.
