Rivaled only by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 “The Scarlet Letter,” the 1851 “Moby-Dick” stands as the great novel of the pre-Civil-War era, an early masterpiece in a still-nascent American literature. In its time, however — and despite the success of such earlier novels as “Typee” — the ambitious “Moby-Dick” found only a tepid critical reception.

The disappointment set the tone for the remainder of the 1850s and shaped Melville’s later career as a writer of fiction. In the 1860s, discouraged and with a family to support, he went to work as a federal customs inspector and turned his literary energies to poetry. 

That poetry went unappreciated in Melville’s lifetime. It wasn’t until 1971 that a critical edition of his poems appeared, selected by Robert Penn Warren. As is evident in today’s Poem of the Day, “The Maldive Shark,” his poetic sensibilities are more at home in the Modernist context than in the era of the 19th-century Fireside Poets.

With its wry examination of two sea creatures bound together in symbiosis, Melville’s shark presages the work of such poets as Marianne Moore, whose “A Jellyfish” appeared as Poem of the Day in July 2022. Melville’s method here — sustained observation, holding its subject as an object of scrutiny without any imposition of meaning or moral — seems far more akin to Moore’s 20th-century process than to anything produced in the 19th century by a Longfellow or a Whittier, or even a Whitman.

Though it appears as a single stanza, the poem unfolds in ballad quatrains. Their end-rhymes, in the b lines, pair such words as dread and head, gates and fates, treat and meat, as if the poet meant to reign in any stray flights of poesy that might divert the readers attention from the reality of the shark. Though the pretty little pilot-fish darts in safety in and out of the “port of serrated teeth,” the shark is never anything more or less than a deadly “dotard,” a “pale ravener of horrible meat.”

The Maldive Shark
by Herman Melville

About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
How alert in attendance be.
From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw
They have nothing of harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before his Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In white triple tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril’s abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!
They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey,
Yet never partake of the treat—
Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,
Pale ravener of horrible meat.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.