The Buckley School's founder believed all public speakers should hone their presentation skills by reading poetry out loud. We keep that worthwhile practice alive by including a poem in our magazine each month for you to read aloud.
"Even at their most conventional, most of Melville's poems never escape context: they are formal machines for processing experience."
– Gillian Osborne
Say the name Herman Melville, and most of us immediately think: Moby Dick. While this famed novel is the work we most often study, turns out Melville was a serious and diligent writer of poetry, as well
"When he stopped publishing novels in 1857, it wasn't because he had run out of ideas—it was because no publisher could afford to print his books, which always lost money. He started writing poetry instead," writes Mark Beauregard, whose 2018 historical novel is based on Melville's life.
Melville's first book of poems follows events across the Civil War. His next, Clarel, is a long poem telling the story of a divinity student traveling the Middle East. Even as Melville retired from other work, he wrote more poems--paying for the publication of the last two volumes himself.
Below, a poem with a vibe that will feel familiar to students of Melville--for you to read out loud.
Misgivings
When ocean-clouds over inland hills
Sweep storming in late autumn brown,
And horror the sodden valley fills,
And the spire falls crashing in the town,
I muse upon my country's ills—
The tempest bursting from the waste of Time
On the world's fairest hope linked with man's foulest crime.
Nature's dark side is heeded now—
(Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)—
A child may read the moody brow
Of yon black mountain lone.
With shouts the torrents down the gorges go,
And storms are formed behind the storm we feel:
The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.
