moby dick erasure poetry

We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
Promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of,
be it beast, boat, or stone, Rabelais, “Very like a whale”—
Hamlet. To fifty chosen sylphs of special note
floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,
peopling every wave.

It is a way I have of driving off the spleen
I account it high time to get to sea.
Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship
almost all men in their degree cherish very nearly
the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

waterward
what is the one charm wanting?

when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies
were Niagara but a cataract of sand
at some time or other, crazy to go to sea?
Surely all this is not without meaning.

I begin to grow hazy about the eyes
a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics
secretly dogs me. “Grand Contested Election
for the Presidency of the United States.”
“WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.”
“BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.”
a portentous and mysterious monster roused
I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.

the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits.

2
the Tyre of this Carthage;—the place where the first dead American whale was stranded.
What a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.

3
a nameless yeast
dead sartainty
The whale’s mouth—the bar—

sleep in your own skin
a man can be honest in any sort of skin
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
“Good night, landlord,” said I, “you may go.”
I turned in, and never slept better in my life.

4
For what seemed ages piled on ages
“Queequeg!—in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!”
But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition stage—neither caterpillar nor butterfly
unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks

5
sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!

6
but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs.
So omnipotent is art
though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands

7
who have placelessly perished
In what census of living creatures
All these things are not without their meanings
Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?
what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance
my body is but the lees of my better being
In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket

8
Ehrenbreitstein
Between the marble cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit
without a trace of the same sea-taste
Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.

9
sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson
How billow-like
We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom
And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
skulks about the wharves of Joppa
the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked burden
boatswain
He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him.
shrieks in his dead ear, ‘What meanest thou, O, sleeper! Arise!’
heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms
the light leaping from his eye
a lull in his look
Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me.
I have read ye by what murky light
God spake unto the fish
I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own.

10
in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold
I felt a melting in me
No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.
a very sight of sights
I’ll try a pagan friend
He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be.
But what is worship?
And what is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me—that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator.
kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.

11 NIGHTGOWN
Yes, we became very wakeful;
our four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug
I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold
For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy then
sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend

12
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
—this sea Prince of Wales
it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die a pagan.
And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home.
He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds
His story being ended with his pipe’s last dying puff, Queequeg embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were sleeping.

13
the people stared
for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their streets,—but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms
Didn’t our people laugh?
Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire
by turns revealing his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved.
From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle
Was there ever such unconsciousness?
He only asked for water
It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians.

14
that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles
Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his

15
Tophet
“Both,” says I; “and let’s have a couple of smoked herring by way of variety.”

16
as a rather good sort of god,
meant well enough upon the whole
her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne
A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

22
there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer
the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.

24
butchers of the bloodiest badge
unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!
the cosmopolite philosopher cannot
whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves pregnant from her womb
the whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler
there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me
for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

26
in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him
these three mates—Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous men

28
For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.

29
The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights
Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ’em. But that’s against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth—So here goes again. But how’s that? didn’t he call me a dog? Blazes!

30
seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized?
this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe!
to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble.

32 CETOLOGY
Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life.
are lungless
an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face
grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

33 THE SPECKSYNDER
live together; for all that, the punctilious externals, at least
For be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass.
what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!

34
Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar,

35
azimuth compass observations,
With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I—being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude—how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships’ standing orders, “Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.”
let me in this place movingly admonish you
the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”
Those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home.
opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
Over Descartian vortices you hover
Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

36
but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance.
But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features
If man will strike, strike through the mask!
Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations.
There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards—the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. ’Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. (Aside) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.”
the subterranean laugh died away
those wild eyes met his
Short draughts—long swallows, men;
It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the serpent-snapping eye. Well done
Men, ye seem the years; so brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!
St. Vitus’ imp

37
this Iron Crown of Lombardy
Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power
damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—good night!
(waving his hand, he moves from the window.)
Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies—Take some one of your own size; don’t pommel me! No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!

38
she’s overmanned
Demigorgon
Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward!
with soul beat down and held to knowledge,—as wild, untutored things are forced to feed—

39
a laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer
We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light,
To love, as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim,
And break on the lips while meeting.

40
(thrusts his head down the scuttle,)
We sing; they sleep—aye, lie down there
eating Amsterdam butter
AZORE SAILOR. (Dancing)
CHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself.
green navies and the green-skulled crews! Well, well; belike the whole world’s a ball, as you scholars have it; and so ’tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you’re young; I was once.
would all the waves were women, then I’d go drown, and chassee with them evermore!
warm, wild bosoms in the dance
the over-arboring arms
leet interlacings of the limbs—lithe swayings—coyings—flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye, else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (Nudging.)
Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls!
low veiled, high palmed Tahiti!
Who’d go climbing after chestnuts now?
Jimmini
that anaconda of an old man swore ’em in to hunt him!
thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness
preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!

41
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.
—as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to.
and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone
Olassen and Povelson
Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.
No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him
all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea
all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain;
monomania
a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity
his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad
Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing

42
It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.
as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls;
hue
Pegu
magniloquent ascriptions of dominion;
Hanoverian
the great Austrian Empire, Cæsarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue
Significant of gladness for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day;
Wampum
He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses
Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls.
heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him again.
a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael.
Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey—
Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.
Nature absolutely paints like the harlot
pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper
Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

44
old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee;

45
but that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages; so that for the millionth time we say amen with Solomon—Verily there is nothing new under the sun.

46
yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable—they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness—and when retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that temporary interests and employments should intervene and hold them healthily suspended for the final dash.

47
that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates
finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, free will, and necessity—nowise incompatible—all interweavingly working together.

48
a certain diabolism of subtilty
The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions
fun and fury
but I shall go stark, staring mad

50

“I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.”

for in a whaler wonders soon wane.

52
But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.