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. Rolfe speaks at length about his convic- Tomb and Fountain ; The Recluse ; The Sitetions, pointing out long as children feel affrightof the Passion / In darkness, men shall fear a God. ScienceClarel visits Agar and Ruth often.Both womencan help bring man out of his ignorant stategrow fond of him, even though he does not shareand deepen, enlarge his consciousness. Buttheir Jewish blood.He observes how the fam-though twere made / Demonstrable that Godily feeling of the Jew, / Which hallowed by eachis not / What then? it would not change thispriestly rite, / Makes home a temple. In his visionlot: / The ghost would haunt, nor could be laid, of Ruth, Clarel seeks paradise, to try to realize theRolfe concludes.Doubts about God and religionunreal! The narrator says that Ruth and Clarel areare nothing new, Rolfe continues: Caesar hislike a vision of Eden won back.atheism avowed / Before the Senate. Like a tide,At the tomb of the Holy Sepulchre, Clarel seesRolfe s ideas overwhelm Clarel, while Vine holds a funeral [somber] man, yet richly fair, a shy fig-back.ure who salutes Clarel when he realizes he has been discerned. Later, Nehemiah and Clarel encoun-Canto 32: Of Rama ter the stranger again, and he and Clarel exchangeThe narrator invokes Rama, the epic hero of thesympathetic glances.Indian Ramayana, the Sanskrit epic that tells theThe stranger s name is Vine, the narratorstory of Rama, the incarnation of Vishnu whoreveals, although to say much about his back- appears on Earth to do battle with Ravana, aground would not explain much about him.Vinegreat demon threatening mankind.Like Christ,has a magnetic appeal, although the narrator has- Rama is both man and god, although he doestens to add that he is no saint.He is a recluse not recognize his divinity.Are there such men aswhom Clarel wishes to approach but does not Rama, the narrator asks, who lead unspotted livesknow how.Nehemiah and Clarel are in the Gar- and yet like him are forced into outlawry : Mayden of Gethsemene, near the foot of the Mount of life and fable so agree? Can there be, in fact,Olives, just east of Jerusalem, the site of Christ s an innocent self? Perhaps only in verse can suchagony and betrayal.As Nehemiah reads from the a conception of man be sustained, the narratorBible, Clarel feels a numbness coming over him speculates. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land 51Cantos 33 34: By the Stone ; They Tarry asks Clarel what he knows about Nehemiah s past.Looking over Jerusalem the narrator tries to imag- Clarel knows nothing, and Rolfe says that Nehe-ine the fair scene of Christ s day, but now a miah reminds him of a mariner, one whom grimvision here conferred / Pale as Pompeii disinterred. / Disaster made as meek as he / There plodding. Rolfe and the others see a wasteland.Clarel listensVine, taking an interest, asks Rolfe to recount histo Rolfe s lament over the scene, but he watchesstory.Rolfe describes a man who is master of hisVine s face for changes of expression, a faceship, a believer in free will and scornful of the ideaindeed quite overlaid / With tremulous meanings,of FATE, which his subaltern clings to in humblewhich evade / Or shun regard, nay, hardly brook /way / That still heaven s over-rulings sway / WillFraternal scanning. and event. The victim of a shipwreck, the masterSurveying the city once again, Rolfe remarks:holds on and is rescued. Strong need st thou be, All now s revised / Zion, like Rome, is Niebuhrized.the rescuers said, / Who has such trial sole sur-/ Yes, doubt attends.Doubt s heavy hand / Is setvived. / I willed it, gasps the master.Aboard aagainst us. Rolfe s reference is to Barthold Niebuhrsealing ship, the master is once again wrecked, this(1776 1831), a renowned German historian whotime by a whale.Is he, then, master of his fate, orsought to establish the historical basis of revealeda Jonah? Rolfe asks.The master, Rolfe concludes,religion.This critical analysis of religion, Rolfe sug- Praised heaven, and said that God was good, /gests, deprives faith of its authority.And his calamity but just. Observing Nehemiah,Rolfe says, Look, the changed master, roams heCanto 35: Arculf and Adamnan there? / I mean, is such the guise, the air? The nar-Arculf, an eighth-century French bishop, made onerator alludes to Laocoön s serpent, which seemsof the first pilgrimages to the Holy Land.Adam-to twine its coils about Rolfe, Vine, and Clarel.Innan, the abbot of St.Columba monastery (in theRome, Melville had seen the statue of Laocoön andScottish Hebrides), sheltered Arculf when his shiphis two sons writhing in agony as the serpent stran-was wrecked on the way back from his pilgrimage.gles and crushes them, and commented on it as theAdamnan then recorded an account of Arculf s pil- very semblance of a great and powerful man writh-grimage
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