Major Thomas Melville
Melville is at the center of one of the best-known poems of Holmes, “The Last Leaf.” It is an elegiac portrait of one of the last surviving heroes of the Boston Tea Party as a elderly man wandering the streets, sadly wan and feeble. Melville is almost important to American literary history in another way: he had a grandson who wrote a somewhat famous novel about a whale.
“Joseph Warren, M.D.”
The title character of this poem is another figure from the American Revolution, though the verse begins a tribute to his professional calling. Later, Holmes pays tribute to Warren’s famous decision to join the battle as a private soldier even though he had received commission as a Major General in the state’s militia. Perhaps Warren’s greatest claim to fame, however, is being the person responsible for getting Paul Revere and William Dawes to make their midnight runs waring of the British invasion.
"Old Ironsides"
Just because it’s a ship doesn’t diminish the quality of the title character as being deserving of the term “character.” This poem written in response to the announcement of plans (wrongly reported, it would later turn out) to scrap the famed USS Constitution is without question the most famous work of verse by Holmes. The opening stanza’s imagery situates the ship as a metaphorical thing of human character and by the poem’s conclusion the author is calling for an alternative to scrapping it: allow it to die and receive a proper burial at the bottom of the sea.
“A Welcome To Dr. Benjamin Apthorp Gould”
It is the words which the poet inserted between the title and the body that explain who Gould is and why Holmes was compelled to write about him:
“ON HIS RETURN FROM SOUTH AMERICA
AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS DEVOTED TO CATALOGUING THE
STARS OF THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE”
And there you go.
“On the Death of President Garfield”
Holmes was famous as a poet for a very specific skill set: he could write a poem for nearly every occasion. While an elegy on the death of a President is hardly a unique occasion, it is representative of this skill. The poet’s body of work also includes “occasional poetry” written to order the Boston Young Men’s Christian Union, John Greenleaf Whittier and the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard.
