Annotations on Civil War: Melville's Battle-Pieces and Milton's War in Heaven

Annotations on Civil War: Melville’s ButtZe-Pieces and Milton’s War in Heaven ROBIN GREY University of Illinois-Chicago For never can true reconcilement grow Where wounds of deadly hate have pierc’d so deep Milton’sSatan, Paradise Lost Il? 98-99’ But where the sword has plunged so deep, And then been turned within the wound By deadly Hate. . . Shall North and South their rage deplore, And reunited thrive amain? Melville,“Battleof Stone River, Tennessee(January,1863)”* n the vast apocalypse of the American Civil War, Melville found the agonizing occasion to return to those questions, which had long troubled him Iregarding the source of evil and the nature of divine justice. Having reread and annotated Milton’s Paradise Lost as recently as 1860, Melville composed most of the seventy-two poems, which comprise Battle-Pieces, and Aspects of the War (1866) toward the end of the Civil War. Melville’s copy of Milton’s poetry in his 1836Hilliard edition shows that he heavily scored extended passages detailing the satanic intrigues at the end of Book V and the War in Heaven in Book VI of Paradise L0st.3 From the passages he scored and underlined , it is not hard to see why Melvillewas attracted to Milton’srepresentation of war. Milton’sdepiction of the War in Heaven offered Melvillea revision, and ’John Milton, The Poetical Works ofJohn Milton, ed. The ReverendJohn Mitford (Boston:Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1836).All further referenceswill be cited from this edition and will appear in the text abbreviated PL with appropriate book and line numbers. References to passages marked by Melville are also to Melville’scopy of the 1836 Hilliard edition. Herman Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects o f the War (Harper’s 1866; New York: Da Capo facsimile reprint, 1995). “TheBattle of Stone River, Tennessee,”11.31-3,38-9. All further citations are to this edition, with titles of poems cited in the text, with line numbers added. 3 For a magisterial, contextualized reading of Battle-Pieces, see Stanton Garner, The Civil War World of Herman Melville (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 1993). On Melville and theology, and also his readings and annotations of Milton’s poetry, see my Complicity o f Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests o f Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 149-227. 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 ES T U D I E S 5 1 R O B I N G R E Y a critique, of the martial epic mode in praise of war.4 The civil war instigated by the rebel angels in Paradise Lost provided an implicit criticism of violence, self-aggrandizement, and military heroism as a basis for nation-building and national pride. It could be seen by Melville to offer a critique of “Manifest Destiny” culminating in civil war. “The glory of war falls short of its pathos,” remarked Melville in the Reconstruction-oriented prose “Supplement”he published with Battle-Pieces. There are other reasons, too, for Melville’sfascination with the angelic rebellion. The original and violent civil war in heaven offered a model for the graphic description of combat on a vast scale. It vividly registered the change from classical heroic combat to modern artillery warfare (gunpowder and cannons), a change in method and scope, the likes of which America had not confronted until the invention of ironclads and “total warfare ,”as in William Tecumseh Sherman’sMarch to the Sea campaigns The War in Heaven, too, gave Melville an example of the logic of secession that leads to civil war, and exemplified strategies of “force or guile”-the latter useful for his depiction of Mosby’sRangers’guerilla warfare in “TheScout Toward Aldie.” Melville wrote the majority of these poems at the end of the War, at the time of the fall of Richmond and the assassination of Lincoln. He was writing in an ideological environment, which was already recasting the Civil War as a just war to maintain the Union and, among the more radical elements, to end slavery.6 The poems of...