SOURCE: “Melville and the Sea,” in Soundings, Vol. 62, No. 4, Winter, 1979, pp. 417-29.

In the following essay, Hamilton discusses Moby-Dick's sea in terms of its theological significance to Melville.

For I say there is no other thing that is worse than the sea is For breaking a man, even though he may be a very strong one. 

Homer, Odyssey, VIII, lines 138-39

In Moby Dick the sea appears to mean virtually everything. It is the home of both the nursing whale-mothers and the rapacious shark. It has a serenity that can nearly cure Ahab's monomania; it is also darkness and death. It is in any case the primary symbol in Moby Dick and a clue to Melville's artistic and religious imagination. If, as Melville reminds us, the sea covers two-thirds of the earth, it also seems to cover two-thirds of Moby Dick. It is both earth's center, its...