Moby Dick

Chapter 8

"The Pulpit"

At the opening of this chapter, "a man of certain venerable robustness entered;" the famous Father Mapple. Ishmael spent a paragraph describing him before moving on to the pulpit. It was very tall, and equiped with a rope ladder in place of stairs, which Father Mapple scaled to attain his posistion. Strangely, after he reached the top, he turned and pulled the ladder up after him. Ishmael wondered why, and came to the conclusion that is was a symbol of his spiritual withdrawal from the outside world for the period of the services.
 Besides the ladder, Mapple had drawn other things from his seafaring past. The wall behind him was covered with a painting of a ship beating it way through a storm, with a small hole with a face breaking through the clouds. Additionally, the pulpit was in the shape of the prow of a ship, with the Holy Bible resting on a piece of scrollwork like that at the head of the ship. Ishmael remarked the appropriateness of the analogy of the pulpit being the bow of the world.
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References:
"the spring verdure peeping forth": verdure can mean freshness or vigor.
"his great pilot cloth jacket"
"and overshoes were one by one removed": overshoes arewaterproof outer shoes worn over the regular shoes
"hansome pair of red worsted man-ropes":For a definition of 'worsted', see ch. 6, 'bombazine cloak'
"impregnable in his little Quebec"
"a lofty Ehrenbreitstein": a fortress in Coblenz, West Germany, built in the 12th century [Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd ed.]
"Between the arble cenotaphs on either hand":Cenotaphs are memorial tablets for people buried elsewhere.
"Serenest azure is at hand": Azure can refer to a clear, cloudless sky.