Essay Questions

What might be the purpose of Melville’s giving the poem the subtitle indicating it relates the events taking place in a dream?

The official title of the poem is “The Berg (A Dream)” and this purposeful inclusion of information that is corroborated nowhere in the text certainly indicates some level of significance. At no point in his relation of the disaster at sea does the narrator mention dreaming. Of course, careful scrutiny of the narrative would almost immediately raise doubts that he could possibly be describing an actual event. While the speaker describes in meticulous detail the reaction of nature to the collision between ship and ice, he never once mentions the presence of any human involvement other than his own eyewitness account. While it certainly may be that the subtitle “A Dream” was appended at some point between composition and publication as a means of explaining this significant absence in his detailed reportage, a much more likely explanation is that Melville wanted to heighten the intensity of understanding the abstract subtext at work in the verse rather than concentrating on the event itself. Melville is a profoundly symbolic writer whose creative writing always works on multiple levels and signaling in the title that this shipwreck is not intended to be understood literally may have been especially important following the failure of contemporary American critics to grasp the greatness of his novel Moby-Dick.

How does “The Berg” fit comfortably as a poetic companion piece to Moby-Dick as an exploration of obsession with evil?

Both the novel and the poem are first-person accounts in which the author introduces himself in the opening line. While “I saw a ship of martial build” may not quite compare with “Call me Ishmael” on the grand scale of memorable first lines, it does work to immediately inform the reader that what follows is a witness account. Perhaps Melville even decided to make the poem the recounting of a dream as a calculated ploy to distinguish it from the realism of his novel. Both this unnamed observational narrator and the more famous Ishmael bear witness to extreme examples of madness. In the one case, the madness is personified in the monomania of Captain Ahab and in the other in the abstract possibilities of an unknown captain steering his ship into a giant block of ice. Admittedly, the madness behind the steerage of this ship remains abstract for many reasons, but if it was the captain who purposely put his entire crew at risk by sailing headlong into an iceberg, that creates a palpable connection to Melville’s famous work. Here we have two ships seemingly being skippered by a mad desire to chase after a thing of great, horrible whiteness which winds up destroying all but the one lone witness who survives to tell the tale. The whiteness of the iceberg, the great natural power is wields and the almost collateral issue of the loss of human life are all strikingly similar to the events which had been earlier recounted in prose.

When Melville completed Moby-Dick, he wrote a letter to fellow author and close friend Nathanael Hawthorne in which he confessed that he felt he had “written an evil book.” Could one conceivably justify calling “The Berg” an evil poem?

To term any poem “evil” is just an unconscionable as suggesting that a novel can be “evil.” It must be understood that Melville was writing from a philosophy deeply influenced by hardcore Puritanical instruction in the predestination of human life and the inherent unworthiness of it in comparison to God. Whatever he may have meant by “evil” will almost certainly never be known, but it unquestionably is connected to his struggle to come to reconcile indoctrinated religious dogma with his own passion for understanding. That being said, however, one can certainly say that “The Berg” is a profoundly pessimistic work. The pessimism begins with the dogmatic insistence that human life is disposable because of its unworthiness in the face of the hands of an angry God. That no survivors or victims on the ship are described or mention gains significance in light of this. The highly detailed description of the iceberg—the work of God—stands in even starker contrast as well. But if an interpretation takes the view that the iceberg is more than just a natural occurrence and is, instead, a symbol of the work of God in the universe inhabited by man, then what to make of the poem’s final line which castigates the iceberg as a thing of “indifference.” If God created the iceberg and the iceberg is indifferent to the suffering of man, does that mean that God is also indifferent? And if so, is that observation an evil one in the eyes of believers?