these make the end of the tragedy.
Tragedy? Yes. But a tragedy of the same temper as that of the great Dane, where the pursuit of a mortal soul's intention is more, far more, than his mortality. Unseen forever by the world, part of its unheard melodies, are all the lines and colors of the Dauber's dreaming. At Elsinore rules Fortinbras, the foe: the fight is lost; the fighter has been slain. These are great issues, hard, unjust and wrong. But the greatest issue of all is that men should be made of the stuff of magnificence. You close the poem, you listen to the last speech of its deep sea-music, thinking: Here is death, the real death we all must die; here is futility, and who knows what we all are here for? But here is glory.
Only less powerful than the impression of the strain of Dauber's endeavor, is the impression of its loneliness. The sneers of the reefers, their practical jokes, the dulness, the arrogance, the smugness and endless misunderstanding, the meanness of man on the apprentice journey, has a keener tooth than the storm-wind.
The verities of Dauber are built out of veracities. The reader must face the hardship of labor at sea. He must face the squalors, the miseries. If he cannot find poetry in a presentment of the cruel, dizzying reality of a sailor's night on a yard-arm in the icy gale off Cape Horn, then he will not perhaps feel in the poem the uncompromising raciness inherent in romances that are true. For the whole manner of this sea-piece is that of bold, free-hand drawing of things as they are. Its final event presents a genuinely epic subject from our contemporary history—the catastrophic character of common labor, and one of its multitudinous fatalities.
Epic rather than lyric, the verse of Dauber has an admirable and refreshing variety in its movement. It speaks the high, wild cry of an eagle:
—the eagle's song Screamed from her desolate screes and splintered scars.
It speaks thick-crowding discomforts on the mast with a slapping, frozen sail:
His sheath-knife flashed, His numb hand hacked with it to clear the strips; The flying ice was salt upon his lips. The ice was caking on his oil-skins; cold Struck to his marrow, beat upon him strong, The chill palsied his blood, it made him old; The frosty scatter of death was being flung.
Some of the lines, such as—