Student Writing Handbook Fifth+Edition

242 / Types of Writing

both necessity and free will, chance, the force behind the shuttle, yields the final result.

Now that Melville has introduced the motif, he becomes more symbolic in “A Bower in the

Arsacides”:

... the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on
it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers
the figures... .Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle
weaving the unwearied verdure.... Now amid the green, life-restless loom of that
Arsacidean wood the great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging—a gigantic idler!
Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around him, the
mighty idler seemed the sunning weaver; himself all woven over with the vines.... Life
enfolded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat
him curly-headed glories.

A paradox seems to emerge: Both the sun, traditionally a life force, and the gigantic idler, an

obvious death symbol, are named as weavers—the gigantic idler a “sunning” weaver, at that!

The last line, however, resolves the apparent paradox: The grim god, here obviously Death,

and youthful Life are wedded. They have become one and act together as the force behind

the shuttle, that force already recognized as chance. Man, therefore, has no control over life or

death. He cannot, within Melville’s symbolism, use his free will to weave the pattern of life as he

wishes: He lacks “the last featuring blow at events.” Indeed, Ishmael did state, “It seemed as if I

myself were a shuttle,” but the word “seemed” offers the key. Even Job knows (Job 7:6) that “My

days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle.” People cannot control their days.

Melville wants his readers to recognize that this search for the whale, this quest in the open

sea, and, more figuratively, this lifetime quest for answers is in some way fated. In “Faustine,”

Charles Swinburne puts it this way: “For in the days we know not of/ Did fate begin/ Weav-

ing the web of days that wove/ Your Doom.” Similarly, in Moby Dick’s epic qualities creeps a