Art,
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 28, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Art,” was first published in Timoleon (Caxton Press, 1891), Melville’s last work to be printed during his lifetime. About the collection, scholar Leon Howard wrote in his book, Herman Melville: A Biography (University of California Press, 1951), “The most consistent theme running through the poems in Timoleon was that of devotion to ‘Art’—often with the implication that the devotion required and received a voluntary sacrifice of worldly success. [. . .] Melville may have looked particularly back to the lonely winter of his struggle with Moby Dick when, nearly forty years later, he wrote and revised and finished the little poem he called ‘Art.’”
Herman Melville
