The poems include "John Marr", "Bridegroom Dick", "Tom Deadlight", "Jack Roy", "The Haglets", "The Æolian Harp", "To the Master of the 'Meteor'", "Far off-Shore", "The Man-of-War Hawk", "The Figure-Head", "The Good Craft 'Snow-Bird'", "Old Counsel", "The Tuft of Kelp", "The Maldive Shark", "To Ned", "Crossing the Tropics", "The Berg", "The Enviable Isles", and "Pebbles I-VII". The critic
F. O. Matthiessen finds an "oblique parable" to the bleakness of Melville's own later years in the title poem, "John Marr". In it, Marr, an old sailor, has left the "vastness of the sea for the vastness of the prairies". Melville's preface to the poem says that the pioneers there were "kindly", but "staid" and "sincerely, however narrowly, religious". They lacked "the free-and-easy tavern clubs ... in certain old and comfortable seaport towns", and were lacking "geniality, the flower of life springing from some sense of joy in it". But when Marr tried to enliven the occasion with a story of his adventures at sea, the blacksmith honestly said to him: "Friend, we know nothing of that here". ==References==