But back to the MN question. Back to purrty purrtry. Melville (etym. honey-city). Bees symbolic (& empiric) of Israel; he went there, writing long poem of title which I ferget.

At the center of Moby Dick, at the center of the mast of the Pequod (anybody following the "smoke shop" issue in Narragansett-land?), is nailed a gold doubloon struck in Quito, Ecuador : a symbol of chance and egualidad (have I got that right?).

Jubilee is liberation theology; the Sunday of the earth, the release from debt.

Dante represents poetry's victory over the trobar clus of medieval Romance. The vernacular reaches beyond the death of the Beloved and beyond the poetry of the death of the Beloved (Poe) to the poetry of the infantile love of God, the bambino-babble, the kingdom. A representation grounded in the Eddy-Pussy war between Latin & vernacular.

Dante represents the hope of metaphysical dance music, after the prose of Melville's penetrating dismal frightful intelligence (Herman-Merman-Leonardo : the deeper diver-diviner, the truer mama's boy. Deeper than Dante, maybe).

This is the difference between Melville's disaster & the Moderns'.