Herman Melville worked as many jobs as Colonel Sanders,
store and bank clerk, farm hand and teacher,
but none but the sea and whaling
satisfied him into writing the popular Typee,
and other novels of the noble savage,
first rejected because the critics
said the tales couldn’t be true.
He wrote as deep as Moby Dick
when the white whale plunged,
snatched Ahab’s leg and soul.
But fame swam off like the white beast,
flayed by British and American pundits,
sliced and stripped like a dead whale,
never to be enjoyed in his lifetime,
his poetry and Billy Budd
drowning in anonymity,
Melville ended in a pauper’s death.
For thirty years, his masterpiece
lay in the shallows on a few library shelves
until the great American scholar
Carl Van Doren discovered his genius
and brought it to the shore of fame
where it will swim forever.
When I get to Heaven,
I want to be the first to tell Melville
of his glory unless his best friend
Hawthorne beats me to it.
Originally published in Corvus Review