Marybeth Reilly-McGreen

Professor Martha Elena Rojas

English 396 Literature of the Sea

29 March 2019

Moby-Dick and the Poetics of Terror

Sometimes a story is so old, worn, and known that plot alone no longer builds suspense. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is one such story. What compels a person to stick with a story whose ending is known from the beginning? Why do fans of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women reread in the hopes that this time, Beth won’t die and Jo will say yes to Laurie? Why do audiences watching Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln hold their collective breath as Congress votes to ratify the Thirteen Amendment? Why, when it is known that the whale wins, does the reader invest in the pursuit? In the case of Moby-Dick, one answer is poetry. Specifically, it is Melville’s use of the poetic devices of sibilance, consonance, and imagery, that seeds the foreboding that builds to terror—of the known.

Melville’s repetitive use of a single letter, “s,” in “The Whiteness of the Whale,” “The Spirit-Spout,” and “The Town-Ho’s Story” confers epic status onto what was, at the time of its publication and at first blush, a contemporary, realistic whaling story. In “Whiteness,” the word “whiteness” alone appears twenty-two times. Narratologically speaking, Ishmael turns bard, listing the many instances, across time and culture, when whiteness was used to inspire terror, a defense of his argument that, “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me” (Melville 151). Read aloud, the sibilance in “The Whiteness of the Whale” has the effect of an extended hiss—the sound one might expect to hear if a serpent were given a human voice—and brings the reader to a moment reminiscent of the devil’s temptation of Jesus in the desert: “Is it that by its indefiniteness [whiteness] shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation” (Melville 157). The poetic device of sibilance is a riptide intent on delivering the reader into oblivion.

Chapter 51, “The Spirit-Spout,” uses sibilance to a different effect. Here words work together like lapping waves and the effect is at once soporific and awe-inspiring. There is also the echo of enjambment as if verse were hiding in plain sight:

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlit night, when all              the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what                  seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in                    advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. (Melville 183)

“Scrolls of silver,” “soft, suffusing seethings,” and “silvery silence,” “a silent night a silvery jet” together signify that something otherworldly, something supernatural is being witnessed. And, indeed, the crew greets the sighting of the “midnight-spout” as a wondrous thing even as it terrifies them: “For a time, there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas” (Melville 184). In his employment of lyrical language and allusive references to classical maritime epics that use of words such as “silver,” “god,” “monster” and “savage seas,” implies, Melville’s text amps up the apprehension.

And in Chapter 54, “The Town-Ho’s Story,” sibilance underscores a depth-charge moment in the narrative: the death of Radney and the prefiguring of Ahab’s demise. Sea and whale are co-conspirators in the sailor’s death:

[Radney] was always a furious man, it seems, in a boat. And now his bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale’s topmost back. Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a blinding foam that blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat struck as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing mate. That instant, as he fell on the whale’s slippery back, the boat righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed into the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws, and rearing high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went down (Melville 202).

The cumulative effect of the letter “s” evokes an image of the sea as violent and mercurial with the ability to dash, toss, strike, rush, and seize those who would venture upon it. And the whale rushing “round in a sudden maelstrom” conjures still another sound: the sea sucking the hapless Radney down into the awaiting jaw of the whale. Later in Chapter 58 “Brit,” Melville imbues the sea with a malevolence equal to if not exceeding that of the anthropomorphized white whale:

But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own offspring: worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests: sparing not the creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe (Melville 214-215).

And so that third villain, the sea, is revealed as the last member of an unholy trinity: Ahab, Moby Dick, and itself. The sea, though, is clearly the novel’s counterpart to the Judeo-Christian Old Testament God, a vengeful, warrior deity. It faces no foe nor perilous fate. It is masterless and rampant.

Harmony, or consonance, is another poetic device Melville employs to create a mood of anxiety. As the voyage progresses and The Pequod gives chase, Ahab’s sheds the propriety expected in a captain and allows his madness to be seen:

During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab; though assuming for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed his mates. . . . Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists. So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal his very eyelashes together (Melville 185).

“Blackness,” “continual command,” “elements,” “assuming,” “drenched and dangerous deck,” “manifested,” “gloomiest reserve,” “grasping a shroud,” “occasional squall of sleet or snow”: in such word choices, Melville is delivering the story in the sonorous voice due a magnum opus. And the image they conjure, that of a man whose need for revenge doesn’t merely supersede good judgment but more tellingly causes him to abandon his duty to his crew is a signal that the ship is no more safe than the water as each has its monsters.

“The Spirit-Spout” ends with Starbuck shuddering and calling Ahab a “terrible old man” (Melville 185). Looking at the text that immediately precedes this observation, it is interesting to consider that the immensity of the sea seems, at least in that moment, less frightening to Starbuck. Melville writes,

the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast (Ibid).

There, again, is the third monster: the sea, mad and glad, tossing The Pequod about on its “demoniac waves,” shrieking as it does so. But the thing that unnerves Starbuck is the beholding of Ahab in repose:

Never could Starbuck forget the old man’s aspect, when one night going down into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw him with closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair; the rain and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he has some time before emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat. . . . His lantern swung from this tightly clenched hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale that swung from a beam in the ceiling” (Ibid).

At this moment, Ahab presents as a dead man in a daguerreotype, propped up in a chair, eyes shut, clothes sopping or as a man possessed, as evinced by the rigor of his form and especially his clenched hand. Ahab’s appearance is all the more disturbing for the fact that he is sleeping through a gale. Starbuck, familiar as he is with Ahab’s madness, is reminded once more that he has cast his lot with a man whose single-mindedness of purpose has likely imperiled them all.

Moby-Dick is sublime in the full meaning of the term. Awful in the sense of inspiring both awe and fear, the novel overcomes its spoilers because of the beauty of the language and how it is employed to build suspense, apprehension, and even terror. Melville’s choice of epic, poetic language to tell the story of Ahab’s ill-fated pursuit of the white whale is intended to evoke other, similarly grand tales and to establish that Moby-Dick’s characters are greater than their guises of man, beast, and water.

Works Cited

Parker, Hershel. Moby Dick. W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.