2 Months of Annotating CLAREL for the Library of America--Full Draft Done, and Still Alive here

I went through my densely marked up copy of the 1960 Bezanson edition which I have been reading since 1962 and put in big black ink at the top of the pages anything I did not feel that purchasers of the Library of American volume would not really know offhand, which meant most of the things I would not know offhand. I did not make commentary except when there would be a "he" a couple of hundred lines on--that sort of thing, where I could put a one word identifier in case the reader did not carry that much of the poem in mind. Melville's syntax is often compressed, gnarled, and sometimes employing poetic inversion, to the point that most readers just would not stop to "unpack" the meaning, as they said in the 1990s. So a few times I resorted to a sentence paraphrasing a passage, neutrally. I drew the line at Adam and Eve and after much reflection drew a lower line at Cain and Abel, but really, people will not often know what goes on in Joshua and Judges and Samuel and Acts and Thessalonians and all. The New Yorker this week cites the book of Revelations. Oh dear! Well, for Wormwood I site Revelation. Two months of hard, hard slogging, but cheered this week by a stranger's gift. I had spent two days searching for the passage from Moses Mendelssohn which Melville quotes (pretty accurately it turns out). I appealed on Greg Lennes's site and after a couple of days Gus Cohen posted: Mendelssohn's Jerusalem!! The NN edition is where any scholar will go (and surely there will be such beasts in the future) but the intelligent educated reader of the Library of America will be lured into this tough poem by my notes, I trust. I am doing to stand up more today, sitting (as I learned to my great agony a few years ago) being the new smoking.