On Melville’s "A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight"

Is the perspective in Herman Melville's Civil War poem about the USS Monitor's naval battle with the CSS Virginia -- the Battle of Hampton Roads -- “utilitarian”?

That is the question I want to pose in a few brief reflections on "A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight," that appeared in his Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, published in 1866. I am curious why Melville chooses that word for his title.

If "utilitarian" means pragmatic, meaning that it is justified by the work or effect that it produces, then yes, the perspective of the poem is utilitarian.  If "utilitarian" means that the Monitor's fight is justified by producing the greatest good for the greatest number by maximizing, say, pleasure over pain, or martial lethality over vulnerability, then no.  In fact, there seems a deep irony involved in the relationship between the title and the body of the poem.

Herman Melville, c. 1860

There is irony because the subject, the first clash of the ironclads, was meant to be a major military advance in naval utility (i.e., ships not susceptible as before to incendiary explosives).  The poet's voice, however, asks about the scope of the effects not just on war but also on the warriors.  If protection from some forms of violence was meant to make war humane, Melville seems to me to suggest that it failed.  War is less grand than peace, he is clear, but technological advancement has introduced alienation that is more dehumanizing than war was previously.  That makes war worse, because it also removes any sense of glory or heroism that might have previously prevailed.

At first I wondered if “plain” in the opening line “Plain be the phrase, yet apt the verse” meant something like the verse would be free of rhyme (“plain”).  Or maybe it meant that the poem would be straightforward and unadorned, absent of affect (“plain”).  But there are literary effects such as enjambment (see stanza 2 especially) and alliteration (“painted pomp,” “gaud of glory”) artful turns of phrase, and some of these are extended across lines to create the sounds of whooshing on the sea (“w”), plosive crashes (“p”), and dental percussion (“t” and “d”) that mimic the fighting to which he refers:

… plain mechanic power
Plied cogently in War now placed —
Where War belongs —
Among the trades and artisans.

What Melville identifies is the seeming needlessness of men now in war, except insofar as the tradesmen and artisans create the “mechanic power” that is the heart of the fighting. The fighting is in fact different. It is “deadlier, closer.”  There is “[n]o passion; all went on by crank. / Pivot, and screw, / and calculations of caloric.”  War is a technical affair, which is to say that it is now more dehumanized.

Use of mechanical prosthetics for war, the distancing, in other words, of men from the clash of battle, which is replaced by “the ringing of those plates on plates,” is not only a signal sound that “Still ringeth round the world — / The clangor of the blacksmiths' fray.”  It is also signal that the romantic or heroic glory associated with war in poems past like the Iliad is also to be replaced. 

One can certainly read the Iliad, as I do, as a critique of war, or of Greek culture’s prosecution of war, or, better, of the violent, dehumanizing excesses of war.  Such a reading entails a critique, then, of the glory that may come from fighting, engaging the enemy, and dying a heroic death about which poets may sing.  In this sense, Melville may be at once ostensibly shifting gears from the romanticized tradition of war poetry to something more “utilitarian.”  Simultaneously, however, he is engaging in perhaps the very best expressions of the poetic tradition.  Those expressions note the ways in which war rips apart human relationships (why does Homer emphasize family relationships left behind when he recounts a warrior’s death in the Iliad?). The poetic expressions highlight the ways in which war calls into question sources of meaning and patriotism (why does Wilfred Owen call “the old lie” Horace’s Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori?).

Ironclad battle: USS Monitor (R) attacks CSS Virginia (L), March 1962

The heroic nature of war, Melville is suggesting, has changed, if war ever really had that nature by itself.  It is altered.  Technology and skill, matters of power and energy ("caloric"), have distanced humans from battle physically; however, in perpetuating their inclusion and their ever more lethal participation in conflict, these innovations have continued to distance humans from themselves – or, rather, more efficiently to de-humanize them, literally.  War will be ever present (“War shall yet be … War shall yet be …”), Melville recognizes, but the human participation in it is changing because of the advent of new, more utilitarian technologies.  For this reason, “war-paint shows the streaks of weather” and “warriors / Are now but operatives.” This evolution leaves its scarring marks on bystander and warrior alike:  “a singe runs through lace and feather.”