Herman Melville
On starry heights
A bugle wails the long recall;
Derision stirs the deep abyss,
Heaven’s ominous silence over all.
Return, return, O eager Hope,
And face man’s latter fall.
Events, they make the dreamers quail;
Satan’s old age is strong and hale,
A disciplined captain, gray in skill,
And Raphael a white enthusiast still;
Dashed aims, at which Christ’s martyrs pale,
Shall Mammon’s slaves fulfill?
(_Dismantle the fort,
Cut down the fleet--
Battle no more shall be!
While the fields for fight in æons to come
Congeal beneath the sea._)The terrors of truth and dart of death
To faith alike are vain;
Though comets, gone a thousand years,
Return again,
Patient she stands–she can no more–
And waits, nor heeds she waxes hoar.
(_At a stony gate,
A statue of stone,
Weed overgrown--
Long ’twill wait!_)But God his former mind retains,
Confirms his old decree;
The generations are inured to pains,
And strong Necessity
Surges, and heaps Time’s strand with wrecks.
The People spread like a weedy grass,
The thing they will they bring to pass,
And prosper to the apoplex.
The rout it herds around the heart,
The ghost is yielded in the gloom;
Kings wag their heads–Now save thyself
Who wouldst rebuild the world in bloom.
(_Tide-mark
And top of the ages’ strike,
Verge where they called the world to come,
The last advance of life--
Ha ha, the rust on the Iron Dome!_)Nay, but revere the hid event;
In the cloud a sword is girded on,
I mark a twinkling in the tent
Of Michael the warrior one.
Senior wisdom suits not now,
The light is on the youthful brow.
(_Ay, in caves the miner see:
His forehead bears a blinking light;
Darkness so he feebly braves--
A meagre wight!_)But He who rules is old–is old;
Ah! faith is warm, but heaven with age is cold.
(_Ho ho, ho ho,
The cloistered doubt
Of olden times
Is blurted out!_)The Ancient of Days forever is young,
Forever the scheme of Nature thrives;
I know a wind in purpose strong–
It spins against the way it drives.
What if the gulfs their slimed foundations bare?
So deep must the stones be hurled
Whereon the throes of ages rear
The final empire and the happier world.
(_The poor old Past,
The Future’s slave,
She drudged through pain and crime
To bring about the blissful Prime,
Then--perished. There’s a grave!_)Power unanointed may come–
Dominion (unsought by the free)
And the Iron Dome,
Stronger for stress and strain,
Fling her huge shadow athwart the main;
But the Founders’ dream shall flee.
Agee after age shall be
As age after age has been,
(From man’s changeless heart their way they win);
And death be busy with all who strive–
Death, with silent negative.
YEA, AND NAY– EACH HATH HIS SAY; BUT GOD HE KEEPS THE MIDDLE WAY. NONE WAS BY WHEN HE SPREAD THE SKY; WISDOM IS VAIN, AND PROPHESY.
Poet’s Note: The gloomy lull of the early part of the winter of 1860-1, seeming big with final disaster to our institutions, affected some minds that believed them to constitute one of the great hopes of mankind, much as the eclipse which came over the promise of the first French Revolution affected kindred natures, throwing them for the time into doubt and misgivings universal.
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Analysis (AI Assisted)
This poem faces the collapse of idealism with a kind of grim endurance. It begins with the sound of a “bugle wail” on “starry heights,” a military image mixed with cosmic perspective. The “long recall” suggests not triumph but retreat, a weary ending rather than a beginning. Heaven’s silence hangs over it all, and the poet turns to “eager Hope,” now told to return and face the ruin of human ambition. From the first lines, this is a meditation on decline—on the failure of progress, the corrosion of faith, and the persistence of power in the hands of those least fit to wield it.
The poem sees history as a battlefield where good and evil have changed positions, or at least grown old together. “Satan’s old age is strong and hale,” while “Raphael” remains naïve and enthusiastic. The contrast between the demonic strategist and the innocent idealist speaks to disillusionment with the moral forces that once seemed clear. Evil has experience and organization; good has only purity and faith, which no longer seem effective weapons. The poet asks whether the causes for which saints once suffered will now be realized through the greed of “Mammon’s slaves,” turning moral purpose inside out.
The parenthetical stanzas scattered throughout act like ghostly choruses or asides—broken voices commenting from a distance. They interrupt the main poem like the echoes of a mind that cannot stop reconsidering, mocking, or doubting what it says. These fragments—“Dismantle the fort, / Cut down the fleet— / Battle no more shall be!”—sound both like prophecy and irony. Even in the promise of peace there’s a hollow tone, as if peace itself has become another form of exhaustion.
The poem’s language alternates between grandeur and bitterness. Nature and time are personified as forces indifferent to human struggle. “Necessity” heaps “Time’s strand with wrecks,” and “The People spread like a weedy grass.” Civilization advances only to choke itself. There’s no faith left in progress or divine reward; both religion and revolution are portrayed as worn-out scripts. The image of “a statue of stone, / Weed overgrown— / Long ’twill wait!” captures the sense that human hope has been fossilized, waiting endlessly for redemption that will never come.
Even so, the poem doesn’t sink into total despair. It keeps circling back to the idea that God’s plan persists, even if hidden—“Nay, but revere the hid event.” There’s still motion beneath ruin, some unseen purpose at work. The mention of “Michael the warrior one” reintroduces divine order, though faintly and uncertainly. But even here the tone is wary: heaven may be “old,” its fire dimmed, its warmth cooled by age. The poet acknowledges the vitality of faith but questions whether it still meets a living response from above.
In the closing sections, the poem broadens into a vision of human cycles. Empires rise and fall, “the Founders’ dream shall flee,” and “Age after age shall be / As age after age has been.” The final lines resign themselves to mystery—“Wisdom is vain, and prophesy.” The best we can do is to recognize the pattern: God “keeps the middle way,” beyond our comprehension, indifferent to our extremes of hope and despair.
The power of the poem lies in its mixture of prophetic voice and weary skepticism. It speaks in the language of revelation but distrusts revelation itself. The tone is grand but fractured, echoing the sound of a civilization doubting its own story. The imagery of storms, ruins, and celestial silence connects it to earlier war poetry, but here the war is metaphysical. The battle is not between armies but between faith and disillusionment, between divine purpose and human entropy. The poem leaves the reader standing in that tension—between belief that something beyond us endures and the recognition that everything we build ends in dust.