Art,

Art,

By Herman Melville

 

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.

About the Poem

Herman Melville’s short but powerful poem Art distills into a few compact lines the contradictory forces at the heart of creation. It opens with a scene of calm:

“In placid hours well-pleased we dream

Of many a brave unbodied scheme.”

Here, Melville acknowledges what many of us know too well—ideas come easily in quiet moments. Our minds are full of “unbodied schemes,” bold plans and visions that exist only in imagination. But dreaming alone is not art. The difficulty lies in giving those dreams form, in pulling them out of the ether and shaping them into something tangible.

Melville describes this process as a marriage of opposites:

“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.”

Each pair of opposites illustrates the tension of creation. Art requires both the fire of inspiration and the cooling restraint of discipline. It requires patience to endure long labor, and bursts of joy to keep the work alive. An artist must balance humility before the task with pride in their own vision, instinct with study, raw emotion with critical judgment.

These contradictions are not obstacles—they are the materials. To create something of value, the artist must bring them together, “fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart, / To wrestle with the angel—Art.”

That final biblical allusion is striking. In Genesis, Jacob wrestles through the night with an angel, demanding a blessing and emerging wounded but transformed. Melville suggests that to make art is a similar struggle: a contest with forces larger than oneself, leaving the artist changed, exhausted, and blessed with creation.

For Melville—better known for his sprawling novels like Moby-Dick—this poem is a confession of the artist’s burden. Creation is not a smooth act but a wrestling match, a fusion of contradictions, a labor of both agony and ecstasy.

I find this poem resonates deeply with the creative process in any form—whether writing, painting, composing, or even living an honest life. We all carry “brave unbodied schemes,” but only by engaging in the struggle, by wrestling with the angel, do we bring them into the world.

About the Poet

Herman Melville (1819–1891) is best remembered today as the author of Moby-Dick (1851), one of the towering works of American literature. Yet his career was far from smooth. His early sea novels brought him popularity, but his later, more ambitious works—Moby-Dick included—were commercial failures in his lifetime. Melville turned to poetry in his later years, publishing several volumes, including Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) and Timoleon (1891). His poetry often reveals the same themes as his prose: the struggle of humanity against vast forces, whether nature, fate, or, as in this poem, the act of creation itself.