POEM

In the Prison Pen

BY HERMAN MELVILLE

(1864)

Listless he eyes the palisades

     And sentries in the glare;

’Tis barren as a pelican-beach—

     But his world is ended there.

 

Nothing to do; and vacant hands

     Bring on the idiot-pain;

He tries to think—to recollect,

     But the blur is on his brain.

 

Around him swarm the plaining ghosts

     Like those on Virgil’s shore—

A wilderness of faces dim,

     And pale ones gashed and hoar.

 

A smiting sun. No shed, no tree;

     He totters to his lair—

A den that sick hands dug in earth

     Ere famine wasted there,

 

Or, dropping in his place, he swoons,

     Walled in by throngs that press,

Till forth from the throngs they bear him dead—

      Dead in his meagerness.