In honor of Memorial Day, I wanted to present a poem that captured the ultimate sacrifice of our military, and this poem by Herman Melville was intriguing and fit the bill.   Yes, this is the famous Herman Melville, author of the great—and to some—greatest American novel, Moby Dick.  Melville, after early success with his romanticized sailing adventures—which were a comingling of biography and tall tale—turned to serious fiction, and though in retrospect he has been revised to be considered one of the great American novelists, in his day was met with both critical and financial rejection.  It was not until almost thirty years after his death that he was reassessed to receive the stature he deserves.

After about a decade of writing novels, and being rejected, Melville turned to poetry.  That too was met with critical and financial rejection.  He is not as widely known as a poet, but some of his poetry is impressive.  In some ways, Melville’s poetry is the opposite of his prose.  Melville’s prose is mellifluous, rhythmic, and at times reaches the heights of Shakespearean poetry.  His poetry is noticeably the opposite: hard, minimalist, and bare.  In the 1860s, with the country torn apart by the Civil War, Melville decided to visit some of the battlefields and capture something of the war in poetry.  Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War was the book that came out from it, a collection of 72 poems.