Melville also wrote poems, brilliantly. Here, as this month's Classic Poem, is one of the best-known of them, ?The Maldive Shark.? The ?sleek little pilot-fish? that guide the ?pale sot? of the shark function as the shark's ?eyes and brains.? Those nouns, eyes and brains, are not literally considered as food, but the poem in an irrational or subliminal way associates them with meat for the consuming ?charnel of maw? in the shark's ?Gorgonian head.? I find an appealingly aggressive, tough quality to the poem, almost as though the poet is thinking about more sentimental, cloying approaches to this same material, such as symbiosis, or the grace of fish. Like Melville's prose, ?The Maldive Shark? has the conviction of its dark, fortissimo manner.
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