Word: whaled
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...YEAR OF THE WHALE by Victor B. Scheffer. 213 pages. Scribner...
When the Psalmist sang "O Lord, how manifold are thy works!" (104:24], he saved for his climactic example the whale-nature's piece de resistance and everybody's favorite metaphor. But the whale, alas, is referred to more often than studied. A century ago, Herman Melville could say of the sperm whale, "His is an unwritten life." Then he proceeded to write it, of course...
What Moby Dick did not reveal, The Year of the Whale does-and on terms that can stand the comparison. Victor B. Scheffer is a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but his facts tick off the tongue of a poet. The result is a brilliant and affectionate one-mammal bestiary...
...Newspaper reporters divided their attention between F.D.R.'s youngest son John and a passenger notable chiefly for having made 22 previous crossings. Desperately, they wove vignettes from such unpromising material as the pet white mouse in a first-class stateroom, the ship's minor collision with a whale, and a vicar selling oak trees to reforest Sherwood Forest. With the weather still too cold to swim or sun, the passengers danced, drank, and rested. The most popular place on the ship was the cinema, which was packed to capacity for both afternoon and evening showings of first...
...surface, of course, politics and history have little to do with a simple, slightly offbeat excursion to Iceland. But for the two young poets the laws of metaphor applied. The ancient island democracy was a place where "Ravens from their walls of shale/Cruise around the rotting whale." Europe was the beached behemoth and the ravens, the Blackshirts and the SS. Out of their few weeks spent getting saddle sores on bad-tempered Icelandic ponies or in rattletrap buses on boulder-paved roads, eating terrible meals of smoked mutton in smokier hovels, Auden and MacNeice re-created an odd and magical...