CLAR-el or cla-REL: Pronouncing Melville's Clarel

CLAR-el or cla-REL: Pronouncing Melville’s Clarel ROBERT K. MADISON University of Arkansas and GORDON M. POOLE Università degli studi l’Orientale, Napoli T he recovery of Melville’s poetry can be viewed in three stages of critical response. The first was rejection. The next stage was marked by a grudging acceptance of the documented fact that Melville had studied prosody and was dead serious about his poetry, but by the feeling, too, that, all in all, he was not much of a poet. Fascinating as the theological, philosophical, intellectual, and emotional content of his major poem, Clarel, is, he might have done better—or so some felt—had he just spelled it out in prose. But then—stage three—as their ears became attuned to Clarel’s archaisms, twisted syntax, missing articles, and other idiosyncrasies, Melville’s readers began to pick up on surprisingly effective, emotionally and intellectually moving verse clusters, if only sporadically. As Samuel Otter urged at the Seventh International Melville Conference in Jerusalem in July 2009, we need no longer apologize for Melville’s poetics: his poems should be read as poetry, with prosodic considerations brought to bear on their interpretation. At the present time, the prevailing attitude toward Clarel is somewhat like Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s perplexed fascination with the eccentricity of Emily Dickinson’s poems. At the Jerusalem conference the present writers noted some fluctuation among the speakers as to where the stress falls in “Clarel.” As small a matter as this may seem, it points to an attitude toward the poetic text in which prosodic elements, in this case its metrics, are receiving too little consideration. Otherwise there could be no doubt as to the correct pronunciation, as we shall see. Form and content are not independent in poetry; a poem cannot be understood without paying close attention to its sound. A case in point is the very title of Melville’s poem. The problem goes back to Walter Bezanson’s first footnote in the “Historical Note” to his 1960 Hendricks House edition of Clarel, which reads: C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 21 M A D I S O N A N D P O O L E “Pronounced Clăr’ ĕl according to family tradition in referring to the title of the poem; the metrical demands of the poem generally support the first-syllable accent.”1 Apart from the argument ab auctoritate, important but not determinant , we argue that the metrics of the poem definitively (not just “generally”) support the pronunciation of the title and the name of the character with the stress on the first syllable. At any event, Bezanson is certainly not suggesting that the stress in the word “Clarel” varies according to the metrical scansion of single lines: it is either CLAR-el or cla-REL, one or the other all the time. Coming directly to Clarel, we must first pose a question of how one even knows the poem is written in iambic tetrameter. It is not just that one was told so, nor that every line goes “ti-DUM ti-DUM ti-DUM ti-DUM,” for they do not. It is that enough of the lines follow this pattern to let a reader attuned to traditional (that is, non-free verse) metrics know that the poem’s underlying metrical structure is, indeed, an iambic environment. And, of course, the poet can count on this expectancy in order to “defeat” it, as the expression goes, by stressing a syllable where the culturally attuned reader was awaiting an unstressed syllable (or vice versa) in order to apply emphasis or some other rhetorical effect. Keeping this practice in mind, we turn to an examination of all occurrences of “Clarel” in the first ten cantos of Part I. Each occurrence is set here in bold face, and we have underlined those occurrences of the word that, given the context of iambic tetrameter, might be...