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As I came down through Dublin City At the hour of twelve at night
 Who should I spy but a Spanish lady Washing her feet by the candlelight
 First she washed them, then she dried them Over a fire of amber coals
In all me life I ne'er did see A maid so sweet about the soul
 Whack for the Too Rye, ooh, Ray lady Whack for the Too Rye, ooh, Rye aye
 As I came back through Dublin City At the hour of half past eight
 Who should I spy but the Spanish lady
 Brushing her hair in the broad daylight
 First she brushed it, then she tossed it On her lap was a silver comb
 In all me life I ne'er did see A maid so fair since I did roam
 Whack for the Too Rye, ooh, Ray lady Whack for the Too Rye, ooh, Rye aye
 As I returned to Dublin City As the sun began to set Who should I spy but a Spanish lady
 Catching a moth, in a golden net
 First she saw me, then she fled me
Lifted her petticoats o'er her knee
In all me life I ne'er did see
 A maid so fair as the Spanish lady
 Whack for the Too Rye, ooh, Ray lady Whack for the Too Rye, ooh, Rye aye
 I've wandered north and I have wonder south Through Stoney Barter and Patrick's close
 Up and around, by the Gloucester Diamond And back by Napper Tandys' house
 Auld age has laid her hands on me
 Cold as a fire of ashy coals
 But there is the love of me Spanish lady
 A maid so sweet about the soul
 Whack for the Too Rye, ooh, Ray lady Whack for the Too Rye, ooh, Rye aye Whack for the Too Rye, ooh, Ray lady
Whack for the Too Rye, ooh, Rye aye
 

Melville – What the Whale Teaches Us | Harper's Magazine

In the world’s menagerie, the whale has a special place. In Genesis, God created the whale on the fifth day, and he made numerous appearances in other books, playing an essential role as a vehicle of God’s will in the tale of Jonah, for instance. But the whale’s most prominent literary incarnation surely is in the greatest American novel of the nineteenth century, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, in which the focal character is not human, but in fact an albino whale. In one sense the other (human) characters of the novel define themselves through their understanding of Moby Dick. Captain Ahab, for instance, sees the whale as the embodiment of “pure evil.” He is obsessed with the whale’s destruction as an act of retribution. On the other hand, in the chapter entitled the “Whiteness of the Whale,” we see Ishmael’s understanding, which starts with a parsing of the significance of the color white. Ishmael gives us a compendium, an exhaustive listing of how a white whale could be viewed as a metaphor. White, he reminds us, is associated with something good or superior, something pure, he mentions pearls, nineteenth century race theory, and the white vestments of a priest. This notion of white is reassuring and peaceful. But Ishmael balances this by noting how often white is associated with fear. There is the great white shark, he notes, or a polar bear. He apparently suffers from a fear of both.
Ishmael then talks about the American aboriginal legend of a divine White Steed, associated with awe and terror. Then he mentions albino humans, who apparently evoke fear in others. After this follows an excursion in Flemish medieval history and a ghost story. The wealth of experience and thought is impressive. It reflects wide cross-cultural experience and reading, the thinking of a traveler and scholar rather than a simple seaman. But Ishmael is an enigmatic figure, a self-described former school teacher, though seemingly an autodidact (whaling was “his Yale, his Harvard.”) He sounds remarkably like Melville himself.

What is Melville up to with this chapter? It seems to contribute nothing to the development of the plot. It can be viewed as an excursion into the obscure. But in fact it is the heart of the entire work. At one level Melville is giving us a lesson in how to read a work of literature and how to appreciate the symbols. There are many possible interpretations, many doors of perception to the world and its treasures. Who is to call one of these valid and others invalid? But he also tells us that how a person interprets the world says much about that person—is he scientific, rational, inductive, or, like the revenge-seeking Ahab emotional, reactive, intuitive? Clearly Melville does not consider these approaches to be equally valid. Ishmael is the compelling character, the voice of narration, the survivor. Ahab is a religious zealot, a mad man racing towards his death and imperiling the lives of his entire crew in the process. Yet curiously, he is the leader; the ship’s captain. Is this a bit of social commentary?

But the “Whiteness of the Whale” is a map to the entire novel; it is essential to teasing out Melville’s deeper meaning and his philosophical approach. Melville uses the image of the whale to describe man’s relationship with nature in terms drawn from the aesthetic philosophy of the eighteenth century. The image of great creatures of nature as something that produces wonder and awe, but also fear in their beholder was first developed in the second part of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757):

There are many animals, who though far from being large, are yet capable of raising ideas of the sublime, because they are considered as objects of terror. As serpents and poisonous animals of almost all kinds. And to things of great dimensions, if we annex an adventitious idea of terror, they become without comparison greater. A level plain of a vast extent on land, is certainly no mean idea; the prospect of such a plain may be as extensive as a prospect of the ocean: but can it ever fill the mind with anything so great as the ocean itself? This is owing to several causes; but it is owing to none more than this, that the ocean is an object of no small terror.

Moby Dick seems drawn directly from this description, which suggests that he is a vehicle for the exploration of what Burke calls the “sublime.” A number of later writers developed Burke’s concept of the sublime further. Friedrich Schiller and Immanuel Kant may be the most consequential. Melville’s presentation also seems to be guided to some extent by Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), which like Burke draws heavily on the notion of the ocean as something unfathomable, immeasurable, incomprehensible, and thus sublime. (Though it is actually a person’s perception of the ocean that could be called sublime, more properly than the ocean itself). But the same qualities that lead to the perception of the sublime also generate fear, which may offset or disrupt that perception. Kant also distinguishes between the mathematical and the dynamic sublime (das Dynamisch-Erhabene), the first would cover something of vast expanse, such as space or an ocean; the latter would be an object of magnificent power and greater immediacy (“die Natur, im ästhetischen Urteile als Macht, die über uns keine Gewalt hat, betrachtet” – “nature viewed in aesthetic judgment as a force which has no power over us.”) Clearly Moby Dick has been chosen as an example of the dynamic sublime, and in Ahab, Ishmael and others we see different human reactions to it. The modern man of power fears the whale, feels threatened by it, and is obsessed with its destruction. The modern man is driven by the desire to dominate his environment and chafes at those aspects of the world he cannot control. The vision of Melville’s narration, however, appreciates the beauty and majesty of the forces of nature even as he reckons with their power and unpredictability. He reconciles himself to their existence. “The sublime comforts, the sublimation of passions through principles is the very essence of the sublime,” as Kant writes.

The whale is a well-chosen image, a creature whose profundity is not measured by the ocean alone. In Melville’s day a great industry arose surrounding the whale, exploiting it for its oil, then used to light homes. Moby Dick is also a chronicle of this industry and its practices, exposed to the harshest light that Melville can muster. Having survived the whale oil industry, whales today are hunted as a source of food and are endangered by humankind’s tendency to treat their home, the oceans, as a cesspool. The fate of the whale still seems dependent on humankind and its attitudes towards a shared environment. Melville believed that the nature of humankind is reflected in its attitude towards the whale. This is no mere literary artifice; it describes us just as well today

http://harpers.org/blog/2010/05/melville-what-the-whale-teaches-us/

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