An audio recording of Herman Melville’s “The Conflict of Convictions.” Read by Doug Storm. The Conflict of Convictions (1860-1.) On starry heights A bugle wails the long recall; Derision stirs the deep abyss, Heaven’s ominous silence over all. Return, return, O eager Hope, And face man’s latter fall. Events, they make the dreamers quail; [...]
Tag Archives: civil war
“Misgivings” by Herman Melville
An audio recording by Doug Storm. From Battle Pieces (1866) by Herman Melville. ”Misgivings” Misgivings. (1860.) When ocean-clouds over inland hills Sweep storming in late autumn brown, And horror the sodden valley fills, And the spire falls crashing in the town, I muse upon my country’s ills— The tempest bursting from the waste of Time [...]
What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive!
Some poems from Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. The Portent. (1859.) Hanging from the beam, Slowly swaying (such the law), Gaunt the shadow on your green, Shenandoah! The cut is on the crown (Lo, John Brown), And the stabs shall heal no more. Hidden in the cap Is the anguish none can [...]
Better Angels on Black Ships: Is There Evidence of Moral Progress?
Update Below: Pinker in 2000 Steven Pinker, language guru, descendant and somewhat apostate of Chomsky, has written a book about the “progress” of human morality measured via a reduction of wars and war casualties called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. In a Salon “Recommends” piece (“Writers choose their favorite books [...]
