Herman Melville, Queen of the Flowers

While most critics have read Melville’s late unpublished Weeds and Wildings Chiefly: With a Rose or Two as a collection of romantic poems for the author’s wife, this essay suggests that the manuscript responds to the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne as well. Returning to Hawthorne in these late poems as both an author and a figure of erotic attention, Melville pushes the boundaries between literature and life in ways that will be familiar to readers of his earlier works. I show how Weeds and Wildings, like another of Melville’s late manuscripts, Billy Budd, investigates sexual desire through the trope of the open secret, though its longings, displayed in flowers, are both more showy and and more secret than the masculine physiques of Melville’s beautiful sailors.