Ahab

In the chapter of Herman Melville's Moby Dick entitled "The Candles", Captain Ahab finally reveals his full insanity and his degree of obsession with hunting the whale. During a typhoon in the Sea of Japan, the ship is torn of her canvas and the masts come aglow with the corposants, St Elmo's Fire, a source of deep superstition to sailors, who believed them to be a portentious omen, "God's burning finger...laid upon the ship". With his soliloquy, Ahab dashes chief mate Starbuck's hope of a safe return to home and hearth and seals the doom of the ship and crew. Below are excerpts from that chapter.

"Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket," soliloquized Starbuck....."The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair wind that will drive us toward home. Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom: but to leeward, homeward - I see it lightens up there; but not with the lightning.

"Aye, aye, men!" cried Ahab. "Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against fire!.....Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me.....Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.....The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling in some stunning ground......Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, though foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief....Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!"

P.B.