Melville's Haglets

Melville’sHaglets ROBERT D. MADISON United State Naval Academy “And a ‘borogove’is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round -something like a live mop” -Humpty Dumpty elvillek frequent “offshore” imagery is drawn from sea-experience not necessarily familiar to most students of English versification. MThat imagery,in turn, can be placed in lyrics where there is no room for the exposition that glosses every nautical image in a work like Moby-Dick. The poem published as “The Haglets” in John Man and Other Sailors (ISSS), for instance, is preeminently an “offshore”poem in its deep-sea version. (The earlier poem “Admiralof the White” may have shared the same title, but is no more a “version”of “TheHaglets” than is the use of similar imagery in Clarel). In “The Haglets,” Melville explores the nature of fate and hubristic complacency through the twin images of a compass gone awry and the foreboding flight of the seabirds of the title, leading to the navigational error that eventually brings a victorious man-of-war onto the rocks. Whenever the haglets may have entered Melville’s conception, their presence became the controlling image of the poem as we now have it. After the weeds and wildings of the opening lines, the flight of the pursuing haglets provides a continuous visual frame, the success or failure of which depends above all on what Melville, in Conrad’s phrase, makes us see. Thus first we must answer the fundamental landlocked question: what is a haglet? A haglet is not a kind of gull -although most critics as well as the editors of the Northwestern-Newberry Journals have depended on the OED definition that says as much. Here follows the OED definition: “Hacklet . . .Also haglet [Origin uncertain] A small species of sea-gull; the Kittiwake.” But one of the illustrative quotes given in the OED is from a passage in Emerson’s English Traits which lists “Gulls,haglets, ducks, [and]petrels.” When Melville used the term in Clarel, he wrote “Scream like the haglet and the gull / Off Chiloe o’er the foundered hull.”’ At least to these two writers, a haglet and a gull are different. Nor was Melville’s haglet a kittiwake, although charitably Philip H. Gosse, a writer and illustrator of popular marine science whose book ’Herman Melville, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newbeny Library, 1991),p. 317;111.14.119-20.Hereafter cited as NN Clarel. L Ev I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L ES T U D I E S 7 9 R O B E R T D . M A D I S O N Land and Sea (1865) apparently provided the OED definition, was reporting some local, but ultimately misleading, British usage. Within the contextof Melville’spoems,it is necessaryto sort out what we are expected to see:the images conveyedby a gull flyingand a haglet flylng are entirely different-as much different,say,asrobinsand hummingbirdsin Dickinson’s“A Bird came down the Walk (Johnson328) and “A Route of Evanescence”(1463). Certainly every reader of Melville has witnessed, even studied, the erratic flight of the gull Melville uses gulls in the first “version” of the image that will be developed in “TheHaglets”: Three gulls continual plied in wake, Which wriggled like a wounded snake . . . (“TheTimoneer’s Story,”NN Clarel 308) “Which” probably refers to the scandalous wake, not the birds, but the combined image is one of horizontal spinning and indirection (“How screamed those three birds round the mast,” Melville continues), rather than the undeviating regularity implied in Melville’slater use of “ply”Elsewhere in Clarel it is vultures who are wheeling, and their voice -not flight -is compared to “thehaglet and the gull.” Their flight more nearly mimics the “eddyingwaters” that whirl astern” in “The Haglets” (linel9). The haglet flies with much more deliberation. The first Melville scholar (and the only one I know of) to identify the bird correctly is William H...