In his Nobel Lecture, Bob Dylan singled out three books for special praise: Homer’s Odyssey, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I hope to have a bit more to say about Dylan’s Homer in the future. This post is about Melville.

If Moby-Dick is one of the books that most affected Dylan and his songwriting, we might expect it to show up with some frequency in a career that spans over 60 years. But it doesn’t–at least in any overt or direct way.

In fact, the phrase “Moby Dick” itself appears just once in all of Dylan’s songs, in “Lo and Behold!” from The Basement Tapes:

I come into Pittsburgh
At six-thirty flat
I found myself a vacant seat
An’ I put down my hat
“What’s the matter, Molly, dear
What’s the matter with your mound?”
“What’s it to ya, Moby Dick?
This is chicken town!”
Lo and behold! Lo and behold!
Lookin’ for my lo and behold
Get me outa here, my dear man!

What’s more, the word “whale” only appears once as well, in the surrealist Moby-Dick send-up “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” on Bringing It All Back Home.

“Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” the only place he mentions a whale:

I was riding on the Mayflower
When I thought I spied some land
I yelled for Captain Arab
I have yuh understand
Who came running to the deck
Said, “Boys, forget the whale
Look on over yonder
Cut the engines
Change the sail
Haul on the bowline”
We sang that melody
Like all tough sailors do
When they are far away at sea

Melville himself–unlike, say, T.S. Eliot, Arthur Rimbaud, or Erica Jong–seems never to have been name-checked at all. There’s not a whole lot, in other words, which is perhaps surprising if Moby-Dick is one of three books worthy of mention for someone as bookish as Dylan is.^[1]

Seems. But seeming can be deceiving, and maybe we should say, with the Prince, “I know not ‘seems.'” For we get a possible direct reference in “Thunder on the Mountain,” the opening track on Modern Times (2006). Dylan sings:

Thunder on the mountain rolling to the ground
Gonna get up in the morning walk the hard road down
Some sweet day I’ll stand beside my king
I wouldn’t betray your love or any other thing
Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of b—–s
I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages
I been to St. Herman’s church and I’ve said my religious vows
I’ve sucked the milk out of a thousand cows

I don’t pretend that this partial verse is just one thing, that it is spoken by a single tongue. So take what I am saying as a hypothesis about one piece of the puzzle.

So: Who is “St. Herman,” and where is his church? There are a few “St. Hermans” in the history of the church. If Dylan is talking about one of them, the most likely candidate is St. Hermann of Reichenau (1013-1064), or “Herman the Cripple.”

Why do I say he is the most likely candidate? Well, for one thing, he was disabled, and the speaker of the song talks about “walk[ing] the hard road down.” But he was also a Christian–hence the “hard road” leads to a “sweet day” when he will “stand beside [his] king.” Next, he was a monk, and this would make sense of the speaker’s “religious vows.” (It’s worth adding, too, that he, while not technically an orphan, was raised in the monastery, to which his parents had entrusted him.) Finally, he was a poet and composer who turned to hymn-writing after going blind (as Homer is traditionally said to have been, and as many of Dylan’s beloved bluesmen certainly were).

That all would make good sense of Dylan’s reference. But there is another possibility. (The two are not exclusive of each other.) And that is that “St. Herman” refers to Herman Melville. What is his “church”? It could be Moby-Dick itself.^[2] It could also be the Whaleman’s Chapel described in chapters 7-9 of the novel, where Father Mapple preaches about Jonah as Ishmael, the narrator, listens. Moby-Dick begins with walking, by the way, as Ishmael discusses his penchant for going to sea (chapter 1: “Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon”).

Is the speaker Ishmael, then? Yes; and no; and maybe. Yes, in the sense that he visits “St. Herman’s church.” No, in the sense that he does not take any vows. (Queequeg does, though, in relation to “his wild desire to visit Christendom”–chapter 12.) Maybe, in the sense that it could be Melville himself, who has often been conflated with the narrator. After all, Melville, whose father died when he was young, was a sort of orphan.

And so is Ishmael. Ishmael is an orphan not just in the general sense described in chapter 114:

Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

He is also the lone survivor of the wreck of the Pequod. And in the novel’s “Epilogue,” he is explicitly called an “orphan”–with the very last and summary word of the book:

On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

About this ending, Dylan comments in the Nobel Lecture as follows:

Ishmael survives. He’s in the sea floating on a coffin. And that’s about it. That’s the whole story. That theme and all that it implies would work its way into more than a few of my songs.

But back to “no”: Who recruits the army of orphans in Moby-Dick? Captain Ahab, also crippled (Dylan refers to his lost leg a few times in the Nobel Lecture), earlier called “Captain Arab” in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” the functional king of the Pequod, who extracts a sort of vow from his crew in chapter 36:

“Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha! Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they all dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.

So perhaps the speaker is Ahab.

To conclude, and to reiterate: I think it’s plausible to see a reference to Melville in “Thunder on the Mountain.” I don’t think it’s necessary, and I certainly don’t think it need displace a reference to the other St. Hermann. Additionally, I don’t think it’s possible to attribute the Melvillian air to any one character of Melville’s or to the author himself. Dylan’s songs are notorious for speaking in tongues–for containing a kaleidoscope of different voices in an almost cut-up pastiche–and “Thunder on the Mountain” is no exception.

But could Melville enrich our reading, our hearing, of the song? Maybe. And that’s enough for me.