Verdure 

for the Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville (2022)

edited by Wyn Kelly and Christopher Oghe

Although it might strike modern readers as awkward or archaic, the word verdure appears in nearly all of Melville’s major works. From the “universal verdure” of Typee to the “enlocking” ground-vines of Weeds and Wildings, Melville’s elegant descriptions of plant processes – germination, flowering, senescence, and decay – suggest that we should think more deeply about the often-obscured significance of vegetal life in his environmental imagination (Typee 49; Uncompleted 104). Plants comprise ninety percent of all visible living matter on Earth, so any understanding of Melville’s engagement with “The Natural World” demands attention to the persistent, extraordinary presence of the botanical in his fictions and poems. Verdure is thus a key term for environmentally-sensitive readers of Melville, one that signals how nineteenth-century transatlantic discourses of natural science influenced his imagery, his themes, and even his extravagant, spiraling style. Frequently portraying plants not as discrete organisms but as dense “masses” of multiple forms of life – as verdure – Melville entwined mosses, bushes, and trees into crowded textual landscapes full of tangled, involute sentences and the branching narratives for which he is celebrated today (Typee 28). Melville’s literary treatment of florae, and “greenness” more generally, enables us to appreciate the magnitude of his ecological consciousness in ways that make his work relevant to broader conversations in twenty-first-century environmental humanities…

Works Cited

Melville, Herman. Billy-Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings, edited by Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougal, Robert A. Sandberg, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Northwestern University Press, 2017. 

---. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Northwestern University Press, 1968.