The Symphony

[spoken]
[STARBUCK]
Ahab

[AHAB]
Starbuck

[STARBUCK]
Sir

[AHAB]
It is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale. Forty years ago! A boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty years of continual whaling! Forty years of peril and storm on the pitiless sea! For forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit, broken the world’s fresh bread to my moldy crusts. Out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. Stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. This is the magic glass. Oh God, Starbuck— I see my wife and my child in thine eye— that young girl that I wedded, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow. Wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive! What a forty years’ fool have I been! Why this strife of the chase? How the richer or better is Ahab now? One leg poorer, that is all. I am old, so very, very old!

[STARBUCK]
Oh, my Captain! My Captain! Noble soul! Grand old heart, after all! Let us fly these deadly waters! Let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s—they wait for me as thine wait for thee! Yes! Away! Let us home!—this instant we may alter the course! Why should any one give chase to this hated fish? How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we sail on our way home! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket

[AHAB]
They have, they have. I have seen them. About this time, the boy vivaciously wakes, runs to the window, and looks

[STARBUCK]
’Tis my Daniel himself! Every morning he races to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father’s sail! Yes, yes! It is no more! We head for Nantucket. Look! See, see! The boy’s face from the window! The boy’s hand on the hill!

[ISHMAEL, sung]
But Ahab’s glance was averted
Like a blighted fruit tree he shook
And cast his last cindered apple
Down to the soil

[AHAB, spoken]
What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cruel, hidden emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing myself on all the time; recklessly doing what in my own proper, natural heart, I do not dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? The great sun move not of himself; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this small heart beat; this small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky, Starbuck; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; where the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field

There she blows. There she blows! A hump like a snow hill. It is Moby Dick