thou wert

Along with the contracted form 'twere, the expression "thou wert" offers a striking instance of poetic language in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" that is not in the style of Philip St George Cooke anywhere else in recorded history, but does conform to a poetic way of talking that Herman Melville adopted at need, repeatedly.



 The grammar explained:

Wert wẽrt The second person singular, indicative and subjunctive moods, imperfect tense, of the verb be. It is formed from were, with the ending -t, after the analogy of wast. Now used only in solemn or poetic style. --fine dictionary

Compare the apostrophe in Mardi to "Orienda," Melville's mythologized Near East:

Oh Orienda! thou wert our East, where first dawned song and science, with Mardi's primal mornings!  --Mardi, vol. 2, chapter 64

with the Captain's manner of apostrophizing the Sweetwater as the mythical river of forgetfulness:

Ah! not long, bright Sweet Water, did we refrain thy tempting embrace: Thou wert a Lethe to the desert behind; all illusion faded from the delightful realities of thy bath. 

--August 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border

ballrooms are bright

"Whether it be trivial
or something that Dante said...."  

It's one of my favorite sequences, the cosmic Fairy Dance:

O, seductive combination of the graces, the brilliancy, the joys of loveliest life!—that givest grace to loveliness, poetry to motion, and gala gloss to all surroundings—that charmest by music, that expandest all hearts, and exaltest all souls to the power of love—the thronged, the gay, the glittering ball! 

O, soft viol, and tinkling guitar—last echo of old romance!—to this solitude you can bring bright memories! Methinks I see a "high hall," whose lights might shame the day; the many white-robed fair,-the far-reaching couples, floating in that fairy dance,—revolving, like the moon around the sun, in circling circles. 

The rosy summer dawn is lovely, and sweetly the birds sing in its praise;—but lo! the sun appears, and gives a magic brilliancy to all,—scattering diamonds and pearls upon the dewy green;—so, always to such pleasant scene, the smile of one, must give the light of enchantment!  

If it be not there,—or if it be clouded, no winter twilight more dismal then, than that glaring ball-room mockery. 

-- Scenes Beyond the Western Border, May 1853 Southern Literary Messenger 313: and

Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 409-410

"Often whalemen have found themselves cruising nigh that burning mountain when all aglow with a ballroom blaze."  -- The Encantadas

Dante on the prairie

Friend. — Is there no end to this trudge through mud and rain? It seems to me we are always the same, — in the centre of a great circle of dank, flat, and changeless prairie. 

"I have been thinking very seriously to what this infernal march may lead us. 'Circle,' indeed! and having escaped from that of incessant fierce winds, we have duly fallen upon the 'third circle.' "

"——della piova,
Eterna, maledetta, fredda a greve." 

Friend. — Of rain eternal, accursed, cold, and heavy — it is a wonder Dante left out the musquitos!

"Yes; but our Cerebus has three hundred wolfish throats which bark and howl at us."

Friend. — Well, I think it won't do ; you have fetched hell too far.

"Only come here in the dog days, and if you can't imagine yourself around the edges of a more than poetical hell, it will be because the eternal winds are scorching, instead of cold." (Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 248-249)

The precise quotation, images and specific details from Dante's Inferno were all added in revision of the original magazine series, Scenes Beyond the Western Border.  The entire passage, quoted above from Scenes and Adventures in the Army, is an interpolation into the September 1851 installment.

In Pierre (1852), Melville's allusions to Dante's Inferno included early and important references to the second circle.  Helen Annn Hauser writes in her 1975 dissertation:

"Hell actually begins with the second circle, where carnal sinners are placed. Semiramis is the first person Dante meets there; Mary Glendinning is specifically compared to Semiramis. Also in this circle are Paulo and Francesca. Pierre refuses to look at Dante with Lucy for fear of some such dark fate as theirs. It then occurs to him that Isabel's face reminds him of Francesca's, and he bursts out, 'Damned be the hour I read in Dante! more damned than that wherein Paulo and Francesca read in fatal Launcelot.' "

 

Also, as Nathalia Wright alluded to in her study of Pierre as "Melville's Inferno," Melville in writing about Francesca in Dante appropriates  language from the Cary translation which he owned.  Cary in the Argument to Canto V describes the doomed inhabitants of the second circle "tost about ceaselessly in the dark air by the most furious winds."  Isabel's face makes Pierre think of Dante's Francesca,

"wafted on the sad dark wind, toward observant Virgil and the blistered Florentine."

The elaborate revision in Scenes and Adventures in the Army fixes on the third circle, but also demonstrates close familiarity with the phenomenon of wind (right, the familiarity that Melville showed in Pierre) associated with the second circle. Clearly the writer is determined to make a structural parallel between the westward journey of the narrator (along with his imaginary friend) and the descent of Dante (along with his imaginary friend Virgil) from the second to third circle of Dante's Hell:

"...having escaped from that of incessant fierce winds, we have duly fallen upon the 'third circle.'" 

UPDATE:  The added dialogue on Hell strengthens the correspondence to Dante's journey which was already present in Scenes Beyond the Western Border.  The most spectacular use of Dantean language and imagery occurs the next-to-last installment, in the dream sequence of the Dantean Fairy Dance.  Overall, the narrative journey of the Captain and his Imaginary Friend "Beyond the Western Border" progresses structurally and symbolically from Hell to Paradise.

Fairy Dance

William Blake
Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing, c.1786
Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED Photo: Tate

No better installment than May 1853 (written I conjecture here around October 1852) to show the exceptionally high literary style of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," without parallel in narratives of Western travel outside of Washington Irving. You would have to look a long long while to find anything so fantastical and fine as the Dantean fairy dance in this number of the Southern Literary Messenger:

Southern Literary Messenger vol 19 (May 1853) page 313

Among numerous debts to Dante's Paradise, the phrase "grace to loveliness" echoes Canto 8, where in the sphere of Venus, Dante recognizes Beatrice and "the new loveliness / That grac'd my lady" (Cary's translation).  The image of "many white robed fair" is lifted from Paradise, Canto 30, where Dante finds the "fair assemblage" of saints clothed in stoles of snowy white. With similar precision, the charming "smile of one" that lights up the ball and presides over the whole "happy scene" imitates the enchanting smile of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven in Canto 31:

... At their glee
And carol, smiled the Lovely One of heaven,
That joy was in the eyes of all the blest. 
-- Paradise, Cary translation

The writer's close reading of Dante's Paradise is certain.  Besides the debt to Dante, another prompt (hypothetically now) for the Captain's romantic vision might have been the recollection of Melville's Pittsfield neighbor Sarah Morewood as the presiding muse over costume balls and other memorable social events. The just-published book Taghconic by Godfrey Greylock (J. E. A. Smith) had described Sarah M. as the "cunning priestess" behind the music-box incident of September 1851, which—imaginatively transposed to the Rocky Mountains—seems recalled in the Captain's mysterious experience of a "sweet waltz" while lying on a rock.

As related by Hershel Parker in Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 1, 1819-1851 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) at page 762, Cornelius Mathews called Sarah M. "Fairy Belt."  To the same effect, Smith's original 1852 account of the music-box incident at the "Rolling Rock" or (later) Balanced Rock, Melville's "Memnon Stone", is preceded by this reference to the elfin appearance of Sarah Morewood:

Her gay, fairy-like figure pressed against the rude, grey mass with such mimic might, reminded me of a task assigned, in some elfin tale, to a rebellious hand-maiden of Queen Mab.

... Indeed, indeed there must have been a deal of witchery in the cunning priestess who made that stern old rock breathe such mysterious and enchanting music. I wonder if ever there was anything in that broken champagne bottle which lay at the foot of the rock. When we had clambered with a world of pains on to the top of the rock, we, too, had music—merry and sad — "music at the twilight hour." Then, as the evening shades deepened in the wood, came low spoken words of memory and of longing for those far away.  --Taghconic; Or Letters and Legends about our Summer Home (Boston, 1852) pages 42-43.

 * * *
Minimally revised and corrected, the enchanting vision of the cosmic fairy dance from the May 1853 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" appears in its expected place in the 1857 book version:

O, seductive combination of the graces, the brilliancy, the joys of loveliest life!—that givest grace to loveliness, poetry to motion, and gala gloss to all surroundings—that charmest by music, that expandest all hearts, and exaltest all souls to the power of love—the thronged, the gay, the glittering ball! 

O, soft viol, and tinkling guitar—last echo of old romance!—to this solitude you can bring bright memories! Methinks I see a "high hall," whose lights might shame the day; the many white-robed fair,-the far-reaching couples, floating in that fairy dance,—revolving, like the moon around the sun, in circling circles. 

The rosy summer dawn is lovely, and sweetly the birds sing in its praise;—but lo! the sun appears, and gives a magic brilliancy to all,—scattering diamonds and pearls upon the dewy green;—so, always to such pleasant scene, the smile of one, must give the light of enchantment!  

If it be not there,—or if it be clouded, no winter twilight more dismal then, than that glaring ball-room mockery.  -- Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 409-410.