Winds of Fate Ch. 24 Graves White Goddess & Ella Wheeler Wilcox ...

[alice wellintown]

The address to the reader here, a frequent scheme in Melville, the use
of rhetorical questions, drawing the reaader into the construction of
the narrative, also erases a character thought to be a major one.
Soon, of course, the protagonist and narrator, one Ishmael, will be
swept up in the Revenge Tragedy, only to return as the work shifts
back to comic mode, a divine comedy with tragic episode, Shakespeare's
play within the playful comedy.

The Wind is Grace: Providence and Wrath. Let thy inspiration flow
through me and make me an instrument of they peace.

But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy;
she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze
the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her
might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the
very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed
sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into
peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally
intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid
effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the
wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the
treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless,
indefinite as God- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite,
than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!
For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of
the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O
Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy
ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!


from Ch. 23 "The Lee Shore"