“The Temeraire”

Melville follows “In the Turret” with “The Temeraire,” an imaginative poem inspired by the engagement between the two ironclads. Though “The Temeraire” reveals no specific indebtedness to the Rebellion Record, one brief passage in the poem may have been inspired by the prose account. The description of the Monitor, with its “heart-of-oak” and its “guns and spars/And sweeping wings of war,” and the way in which “The rivets clinch the iron-clads” may have been drawn from the New York World’s description of the Monitor’s design, reprinted in Volume IV, Doc. 57-59, which Melville probably read with great interest.

From “The ‘Monitor’ as she is—interior and exterior.” Harper’s Weekly, April 12, 1862.

The battle between the “Monitor” and the “Merrimac,” in Hampton Roads, March 9, 1862—Harper’s Weekly, April 12, 1862, p. 237.