Chapter 5 of the classic Moby Dick by Herman Melville, summarized in verse. Read along with us and discuss this chapter or the book as a whole in the comments.

Breakfast

In good spirits Ishmael seeks his breakfast.
The bar room filled with whalers, tired from
their night ashore, cheerful and bountiful.

Shore-leave echoes in the whalers faces.
Each man bore the mark of their miseries.
The youth, burned red, smelling of wet lashings,

could be no more than three days from the sea.
While older men are bleached by weeks away.
But Queequeg’s face was a map of the world,

Mountains lined his brow, parallel ridges
latitudes of life. He sat down, ate, then
lit his tomahawk pipe, and smoked, calmly.