The Melting Mood in "To Winnefred": A Response to Lyon Evans

Letters to the Editor The Melting Mood in “To Winnefred”: A Response to Lyon Evans To the Editor: A note on the expression the melting mood, commonplace in Melville’s day but now less familiar, may be helpful to readers of Melville’s prose dedication “To Winnefred,” which introduces poems in Part I (“The Year”) of the late collection entitled Weeds and Wildings.1 In particular, those who take up “To Winnefred” after reading the provocative commentary by Lyon Evans on “Tears of the Happy” in the recent special issue of Leviathan (October 2007) will want the meaning of “the melting mood” clarified as a result of Evans’s confusing treatment of the term.2 Most essentially, the melting mood denotes “tearfulness.”3 Weeping is almost always involved in nineteenth-century usages, though sometimes implicitly or metaphorically. The ultimate derivation from the fifth act of Shakespeare ’s Othello is definite (not “probable,” as Evans overcautiously reports) and was well known to Melville’s contemporaries, doubtlessly including his literate and well-educated wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville.4 C  2009 The Authors Journal compilation C  2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Until the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville’s Unpublished Poems appears, the most reliable version is that of Robert Charles Ryan in “Weeds and Wildings Chiefly: With a Rose or Two, by Herman Melville: Reading Text and Genetic Text, Edited from the Manuscripts, with Introduction and Notes” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Northwestern University, 1967). All quotations of prose and poetry in Weeds and Wildings are from this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically as WW. 2 Lyon Evans, “‘Tears of the Happy’: The Design of Darkness in ‘To Winnefred’ and ‘The Year,’” Leviathan 9.3 (October 2007): 79–94. 3 “melting, adj., I.2, the melting mood: tearfulness,” OED Online (December 2007), Oxford University Press; 14 February 2008. 4 On the formal education of Elizabeth Shaw Melville, see Laurie Robertson-Lorant, “Melville and the Women in His Life” in Melville and Women, ed. Elizabeth Schultz and Haskell Springer (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2006), 20–21. The derivation of “the melting mood” from Shakespeare’s Othello was assumed to be common knowledge in this weather report from the Brooklyn Eagle (26 May 1856): “The weather has been of different degrees of intensity and disagreeableness within the last few days. Saturday was like Othello’s eyes when he killed Desdemona, entirely in the melting mood, and was ho[t] enough to dissolve diamonds; Sunday was cool as a cucumber . . . .” 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 133 S C O T T N O R S W O R T H Y In “To Winnefred,” the melting mood occurs in a sort of apology from the speaker to the dedicatee for any distressful tears generated by the poems that accompany his dedication. In a fictionalized reminiscence of domestic life at Arrowhead (1850–1863) with his wife Elizabeth (addressed as “Winnie”), Melville has recollected his own knightly gallantry in presenting her with bunches of red clover gathered during rambles in the countryside. On one occasion in late autumn, the clover is lightly covered with snowflakes which melt after the humble bouquet is brought inside and placed on Winnefred’s “maple-wood mantel.” Melville (or his fictive narrator) reminds Elizabeth (or the fictive dedicatee of “To Winnefred”) of her gladsome metaphor describing drops of melted snow on the red clover as “Tears of the Happy.” Melville’s concluding apology, then, invokes the dedicatee’s own figure of speech, retrieved from a bygone era in their partnership of more than forty years, to recommend tears of happiness in some contrastive relation to tears of another kind: And for aught suggestive of the “melting mood” that any [of the bestowed poems] may possibly betray, call to mind the dissolved snow-flakes on the ruddy oblation of old, and remember your “Tears of the Happy.” (WW 6) One of the poems in “The Year” to which Melville refers, “The Chipmunk,” figuratively represents the brief life and early death of...