Grappling with Melville's Poetry

I am descending into madness, or Hades. An explication of “The Great Pyramid” is a bit like Dante’s descent into Hell. Though I read this poem’s tone as one of regret, the trajectory of the collection suggests that in the quest for Truth there is nothing but the quest itself and yet even in this Melville is disappointed and skeptical. Earlier in the collection Melville took the concept of artistic truth to task and determined that this also leads nowhere or at least to great uncertainty. Though he does seem to suggest that the quest to make art offers a path to a kind of truth, it also seems that he regrets his decision to devote his life to art. So here we are at the end of the first stanza of the last poem in the collection and art and religion are hereby renounced as vehicles of truth. Of course for me, this is nothing less than soul crushing. I too have devoted my life to art... though I long ago ceased to believe in Truth.

For Melville, art holds no truth, God is the creation of hysterical madmen, what is left? Love? No. Not even love. In “L’Envoi” our faith in love is also taken away. We can only conclude, as Melville has, that “terrible is Earth!” (line 4). Whether or not these final lines are inspired by the play by Alexandre Dumas, the tone is clearly ironic. These towers are filled with “larger dearth” and the “yearning infinite recoils” (lines 1-3). I read the towers as metaphors for philosophical knowledge and, here again, Melville suggests there is nothing but “dearth” or lack. We learn nothing from religiosity, as the “knowledge poured by pilgrimage / Overflows the banks of man” (lines 7-8). And love? Clearly the last lines are ironic (this is especially true if we can assume that the poem is inspired by Dumas and dedicated to Elizabeth). There is no comfort here, even in love:

                        But thou, my stay, thy lasting love

                        One lonely good, let this but be!

                        Weary to view the wide world’s swarm

                                    But blest to fold but thee.

However, optimist that I am, I read these lines not only as irony, but also as bittersweet longing and regret. I may be reading in, but I think that Melville did believe in love. Unfortunately, he was so bitterly disappointed in love that at the end it provided him no comfort, though it seems to me that he desperately wished that it could “but be!”