John Marr and Other Sailors With Some Sea-Pieces: A Facsimile Edition (review)

R E V I E W DOUGLAS ROBILLARD, ED. John Marr and Other Sailors With Some Sea-Pieces: A Facsimile Edition With an Introduction by Douglas Robillard Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 2006. Cloth $59.00. 235 pp. W ith his timely facsimile edition of John Marr and Other Sailors, Douglas Robillard makes a valuable contribution to the growing body of work on Melville’s poetry, even as he also makes that poetry still more widely available to scholars. While his 2000 edition of The Poems of Herman Melville offered an overview of the breadth and range of Melville’s achievement in his four published volumes of poetry, Robillard’s edition of John Marr gives readers the opportunity to delve deeply into one volume, focusing on Melville’s composing and revising processes. In 1888, just two years after retiring from his position at the New York Custom House, Melville published a collection of sea-faring poems. The volume opens with a ten-page prose piece that introduces readers to the title character, John Marr; Marr is the speaker of the first poem. An aging sailor who has lost his wife and child to fever and is now living in the alien landlocked prairie, Marr remembers with melancholy and nostalgia the voyages of his youth. Other poems in the collection radiate outward from the title piece: as Robillard notes, Melville uses his title character “to sustain the themes of the volume and hold it together” (4). The first group, to which “John Marr” belongs, offers portraits of four sailors; the second, “Sea-Pieces,” includes a diverse array of long and short poems, including the masterful “Haglets,” a meditative account of a naval victory followed by catastrophe, as well as the “The Aeolian Harp,” a poem that examines with an elegiac sense of urgency the changing stances of poetry at the end of the nineteenth century. The third and final group, “Pebbles,” is a sequence of terse epigrams spoken from a range of different perspectives, including that of the sea itself and closing with a voice that seems to be that of John Marr—or perhaps the poet-speaker. While the opening poem “John Marr” portrays a sailor ravaged by loss and aging, the final section of “Pebbles” suggests that Marr has made his peace with grief by C
2008 The Authors Journal compilation C
2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 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 117 R E V I E W recalling the pleasures and terrors of his ocean voyages and by contemplating the human relationship to the all-powerful ocean: “Healed of my hurt, I laud the inhuman Sea—.” Robillard describes the structure of the collection as a “journey of the spirit,” noting that Marr’s contemplation of the vast and empty prairie allows him to reestablish a vital connection with his seagoing past (5). More consistent stylistically than Battle-Pieces, if less innovative in its stances, John Marr includes poems that show Melville at the height of his powers as a poet. Robillard’s edition reminds us of the philosophical ambitions of Melville’s poetry, even as it also points towards the autobiographical undercurrents of this collection. Like his protagonist John Marr, Melville struggled late in life to come to terms with his professional failures, his deep personal losses, and the enduring memory of his ocean-borne travels. In this edition, Robillard presents a photofacsimile of the complete 1888 volume, including several changes Melville marked after the book was printed. Offering scholars invaluable material for the study of Melville’s revision process, Robillard also includes selections from Melville’s hand-written manuscript for the printer as well as galley proofs and page proofs with Melville’s corrections: as Robillard notes, the wealth of available materials from John Marr makes this volume an excellent candidate for this kind of facsimile presentation. Before each group of materials, Robillard includes a helpful introduction, providing both relevant contextual information (for example, a detailed account of Melville’s admiration for William Clark Russell, the English writer to whom he dedicates John...