An Aesthetics of Enclosure:
James Merrill’s Inner Rooms
Sara Lundquist
University of Toledo
Everything beyond a certain distance is dark, and
yet everything is full of being around us.
Teilhard de Chardin
T  , A  James Merrill’s resources
against disintegrative forces of all kinds were two—love and art. ese
co-exist for him most intensely in “inner room” poems capable of surrounding and obviating the consequences of fear and death. Many critics
have documented Merrill’s predilection for interiors, both as settings and
as tropes for poetic form (e.g., Baird; Hollander, “Mirror”; Kalstone). In
his own essay, titled “Acoustical Chambers,” Merrill explains his liking for
“given arrangements”:
Interior spaces, the shape and correlation of rooms in a house,
have always appealed to me. Trying for a blank mind, I catch
myself instead revisiting a childhood bedroom on Long
Island.… fondness for given arrangements might explain how
instinctively I took to quatrains, to octaves, and sestets, when
I began to write poems. “Stanza” is after all the Italian word
for room. ( )¹
 Merrill’s works are cited parenthetically using these abbreviations: : Foreword
to Daniel Hall, Hermit With Landscape (New Haven: Yale , ); : From
ESC . (March ): –
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Merrill also wrote about the poet Daniel Hall, admiring his “compact arenas,” his “Escher-like spatial dynamics,” and commenting that “enclosure
beckons to him like an open road” ( ix–x). Merrill’s own poetry attests
to a similar attraction to the aesthetics of enclosure. Instead of perceiving
language as a prison house from which to escape, he seems to yearn for
more intense interiority, for the solace and liberty of narrow rooms.
e Inner Room () signaled by its very title Merrill’s sense of the
possibilities of interior images and settings. Indeed, this late approach
to the inner room constitutes an arrival of some significance. “Sooner or
later one touches upon matters that are all the realer for not being easily
talked about,” Merrill said in an interview, concerning the “darkest secrets
of technique” ( ). When Merrill takes on these “realer” matters, these
“darkest secrets,” he expands for us the meaning and vocabulary of interiority, and he defends his deep sense of aestheticism in a critical climate
disinclined to appreciate it.
What kind of “sanctum” does the collection represent? How does it
present its own interiority? What does it mean for a poet of interiors to
move further inside? What is excluded, what invited in, and what are the
conditions of entry for the reader? What kinds of language are appropriate? What happens or doesn’t happen there? Is this collection a renewal of
Merrill’s conviction about the value of poetic closure and the composed
self or an inspired questioning of these notions? What are the aesthetics
and the poetics (in Gaston Bachelard’s sense) of inmost space?
Inner room poems are likely to be self-consciously concerned with
their own refinements and their own spatial formalities. is is certainly
true about a sonnet from e Inner Room, “e Parnassians,” which figures poetic refinement as an enclosed inner space, a loge at the opera. To
describe “Parnassian” poetry, Merrill uses the voice of a footman in attendance at the sophisticated ritual of a night at the opera; yet he claims other
linguistic allegiances, namely to “common” language and meanings:
S L is
Chair of the English
Department and an
Associate Professor
teaching Modern and
Contemporary American
Literature at the
University of Toledo. She
has a particular interest
in ekphrastic poetry
and writes reviews of
new poetry for Poetry
Review of London. She is
completing a book, titled
Implacable Poet, about
the New York School
poet, Barbara Guest.
eirs was a language within ours, a loge
Hidden by bee-stitched hangings from the herd.
e mere exchanged glance between word and word
Took easily the place, the privilege
the First Nine: Poems - (New York: Atheneum, ); : Foreword to
George Bradley, Terms To Be Met (New Haven: Yale , ); : e Inner
Room (New York: Knopf, ); : Foreword to Pamela Alexander, Navigable
Waterways (New Haven: Yale , ); : Recitative, J. D. McClatchy, ed. (San
Francisco: North Point Press, ); : e Changing Light at Sandover (New
York: Atheneum, ).
 | Lundquist
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Of utterance. Here therefore all was tact.
Pairs at first blush ill-matched, like turd and monstrance,
Tracing their cousinage through consonants,
Communed, ecstatic, through the long entr’acte.
“Turd and mon-
Without our common meanings, though, that world
Would have slid headlong to apocalypse.
We’d built the Opera, changed the scenery, trod
Grapes for the bubbling flutes mild fingers twirled;
As footmen, by no eyelid’s twitch betrayed
Our scorn and sound investment of their tips. ( )
strance” must
blushingly,
charmingly,
Since the poem is so beautifully realized, with elegant and sophisticated rhymes, modulated rhythms, and varied caesural pauses, there is
never any doubt that the poet behind the speaker is himself avowedly
a Parnassian, one who delights in the complicated and ecstatic familial
interactions of language. e style of the poem wittily affirms what its
statement means to disparage about that style.
Deftly, Merrill can show, by means of consonants held in common, the
relatedness of words that might otherwise hold each other at a suspicious
distance. “Turd and monstrance” must blushingly, charmingly, admit their
chiming kinship of t’s and r’s. It is typical of Merrill that the “exchanged
glance between word and word” which the sonnet enables and enhances
should be imagined as having a spatial site, an inner lodging, and that he
would affirm rather than deny that poetry wills seclusion in order to do
its work.² Parnassian language is always a “language within a language,” a
sacred inner space, “a loge / Hidden by bee-stitched hangings from the
herd.” Along with this easy assumption of the privilege of place, Parnassian language carries the quality of erotic intimacy, loving and almost coy
in its exchanged glances, its blushing matches, its ecstatic communions.
Like loving companions, words celebrate their linkages, their bonds latent
and obvious, ordinary and bizarre.
A “sanctum” of the kind the octave describes is what poetry both seeks
and makes. It is in and dependent on the world described in the sestet
but it is not of that world. “Poetry,” writes John Hollander, “gets to be the
poetry of life by successfully becoming first the poetry of poetry. And yet,
knowing this about itself, it seeks by guile to hide this enigmatic condi See Robert von Hallberg, “James Merrill: ‘Revealing by Obscuring,’” in American
Poetry and Culture – (Cambridge: Harvard , ): – on the
ways Merrill’s poems “honor the boundaries between art and life” and how they,
albeit self-critically, “take for granted the sanctified reserve of art” ().
James Merrill’s Inner Rooms | 
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admit their
chiming kinship
of t’s and r’s.
tion from public gaze” (“Melodious Guile” ). Poetry’s paradoxical need
to “hide” in a privileged place in order to have its say is one of Merrill’s
primary interests in e Inner Room.
e collection begins with an inner room poem that makes a surprising claim: that a day spent by two people in charmed erotic intimacy can
extend its ambient influence into the world to the point of causing a brief
cessation of bloodshed in the violence-riddled city of Beirut, half a world
away. Two stanzas of interlocking rhyme pretend to represent cause and
effect:
Chamber of blossom, not a petal spilled,
Yesterday’s Japanese cherry
—You and I charmed inside the glow—
By evening had borne fruit:
A whole day in Beirut
—According to the radio,
e first since January—
With no one killed. ( )
e title “Little Fallacy,” verifies the reader’s initial skepticism about the
dubious congruence of the two stanzas. Does the metaphorically described “chamber of blossom” belong in the same poem as literal Beirut,
let alone have an effect of such consequence on it? Well no, the title allows
us to say, it is a fallacy, a defect in logical thinking. e poem offers a type
of “pathetic fallacy” in which the poet imagines that felicitous private
occasions can make a stay against confusion even in the form of routinized carnage. He imagines that the brutal world acts (or fails to act) in
sympathy with private moods.
It bears considering, however, why a poet would offer in the crucial
first position in his book a poem about an “inner room” in a self-consciously fallacious relationship to the larger world. With the word “little,”
the poet suggests, perhaps, that although the poem is a fallacy it errs only
in minor ways. e sensuous pleasures of stanza allow one a moment
when the pleasure the poem affords is greater than the “reality” it ignores.
e reader is encouraged to read its medial colon poetically, rather than
logically, as “the tiny doubled point [that stands] for the wobble inherent
in our most lucid views, or the dazzle that besets our least abandoned
diction” ( viii).
To ask what place the inner room of private happiness has in a world
which seems unrelievedly full of sorrows is to ask about the right of poetry
to its inherent pleasures and to its self-validation. For the first stanza is
 | Lundquist
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not only an event of glowing intimacy, it is an event, as well, of language.
Richly compressed, this poem which makes a “chamber” underneath the
flowering branches of a Japanese cherry tree, evokes lyric love poetry from
Petrarchan and English sonnet to Japanese haiku. Among the conventions
of love poetry are those of a sustained moment of perfection (“not a petal
spilled”), spatial intensity, suffused light, fruition, primary nourishment
and plenty, a space of time in which action is forestalled and the world is
held at bay. From haiku, the stanza borrows its Japanese flower imagery,
its seeming casualness, its emotional wealth, and its inspired littleness.
e stanza is voluptuous and self-possessed, a quietly erotic inner room,
reminiscent of the “rosy-lit interior,” the earthly centre of the Sandover
trilogy. It merits the word “glow” to name its self-generated quality of light.
is word is particularly prized by Merrill—he almost never fails to place
it in poems of spatial and poetic efficacy. “Glow” is the most intimate facet
of what Richard Sáez calls Merrill’s “exquisite treatment of light, which is
worthy of his masters in Dante and Shelley” ().
e context of this intimate time and place is the larger world in which
the days “since January” have brought the very opposite of glowing fruition. ey have brought instead violence and waste of human life. Is the
language event of radio news more “real” than the poetic language of love
and intimacy, more to be trusted as a report on the state of the world?
Doesn’t it—shouldn’t it—seriously infect pleasure? What right do “you and
I” have to rooms and times of pleasure when people are being killed daily
in Beirut? Don’t facts and the statistics of horror invalidate the graceful
leaps of logic poetry likes to make?
Merrill perhaps plays on a famous dictum by his poetic mentor, W. H.
Auden—“poetry makes nothing happen”—to assert his own idea about
poetry’s efficacy. Whereas Auden is expressing his disillusionment about
the capacity of poetry to effect social change, Merrill takes advantage of
a lucky coincidence—that his day of love is the same day in which routine
murder for some reason lets up in Beirut—to wittily and wishfully slip in
poetry as the causal agent in this instance of “nothing happening.” e
effect of love and poetry is to create a merciful lacuna in pervasive evil.
Seamus Heaney puts it this way: “in one sense the efficacy of poetry is
nil—no lyric ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited” ().
What is the sense in which the efficacy of poetry is unlimited? Heaney
writes that the arts “strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the
base of every individuated life” (). To do this is to stubbornly add to
the world’s store of good, in conscious contradiction of powerful forces of
diminishment, including guilt and death. In this task poesis (the principle
James Merrill’s Inner Rooms | 
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of making) is linked in Merrill’s work with eros (the principle of love). is
point is made by Helen Vendler:
A continuity between the aesthetic and the sensual is at the
heart of Merrill’s work, from the earliest lyrics on—as if it were
inconceivable that a love of textures, lines, shapes, light and
color should not also be a love of faces and bodies.… As they
combine and mingle, the senses create, in the order of flesh,
interrelations and reinforcings that are like the elements of a
work of art. ()
Both love and art evince strong instincts for preservation and individuation. ose things and persons drawn into the “inner room” enter the
purview of the poet to have the singularity of their faces and bodies, their
lives and deaths verified.
Indeed, while the “chamber of blossom” resides in the context of a
profane and brutal world, the brutal world finds itself affected and contained by the felicities of the chamber, when, later in the day, it is brought
in by means of the radio. e “inner room” as a literal locus of intimacy,
or in its figurative guise as a trope for formal poetry, can be considered
as a context for the world more profitably than the world is considered
as a context for poetry, although the latter is the more usual perspective.
An event (or a non-event) in Beirut emerges out of the cacophony and
background noise of the radio’s medium into the singularity and light of
the poetic medium, no longer just one more dissolving statistic.
e world is also brought under the influence of poetry by means of the
interstitial webbing of rhyme, that tireless and mischievous integrator. e
first line is tied to the last line, the second line to the next-to-last line, and
so on, in a knot that tightens toward the centre, allowing logic to leap the
space between two worlds, two opposites. e reader is allowed a way to
hold “fruit” and “Beirut” in the same thought. “Rhyming enacts some local
verbal magic with the worlds in question,” as John Hollander would have
it, and “By exploiting linkages between words, [it] propound[s] fictional
ones between their referents” (“Melodious Guile” –). Rhyming is also a
“coincidence” that expresses the poet’s belief in the complicated interconnections of diverse events on one planet. e poem perhaps can be read
as a witty codicil to Sandover’s grand “NO ACCIDENT” clause—here a
lower case “no coincidence.” Poetry derives its “effect” on the outer world
entirely from its inner “effects”—its artifices, its rhymes and rhythm, its
assurance, its inherent pleasure in making, its willingness to promote
temporary closure and “local magic.” “Little Fallacy” tests the range of such
The world is
also brought
under the
influence of
poetry by
means of the
interstitial
webbing of
rhyme, that
tireless and
mischievous
integrator.
 | Lundquist
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local magic but does not seriously invalidate it. e title cannot disentitle
the poetry from the privilege it enjoys and confers.
Nor is this privilege seriously undermined by the two-stanza form
which would seem to be occupied with the contrast that binary thinking
implies. In the poem, any number of binary concepts seem to hold each
other in permanent stand-off: private/public, sacred/profane, figurative/
literal, magic/logic, eros/thanatos. Yet the form of the poem is also (perhaps primarily) supportive of the way binary terms are constantly being
found to be virtually embedded in each other. “e unities of home and
world, and world and page,” writes Merrill, “will be observed through the
very act of transition from one to the other” ( ).
Particular to Merrill is the modest and non-strident nature of his
defense of poetry. What at first appears an immodest, unseemly claim—
almost on the level of declaring that his lovely poetic “chamber of blossom”
had stopped a tank—comes, on closer reading, to seem a celebration of
felicitous coincidence, which, when it occurs, is deserving of documentation, not repudiation. But perhaps only poetry has in place the legitimate
conventions for so doing, among them the “pathetic fallacy,” where personal events and the world seem to be in sympathetic coincidence with
each other. “Little Fallacy” concentrates a stance discernable in much of
Merrill’s other work (not excluding the Sandover trilogy): the poet disbelieves with tonic clear-headedness, while he at the same time willingly
suspends his disbelief, to his (and our) greater gain.
In the poem, such poetic privilege is equated with American material
privilege: to live in a country at peace, in relative security and prosperity,
amounts to a kind of election. is election carries a responsibility: that
of acknowledging injustice and brutality without yielding to their dark
pull. Often found working on the behalf of that dark pull is guilt. Heaney
writes of guilty moments in the history of lyric poetry when it
remembers that its self-gratification must be perceived as a
kind of affront to a world preoccupied with its ... imperfections, pains, and catastrophes. What right has poetry to its
quarantine? Should it not put the governors on its joy and
moralize its song? ()
Merrill is not immune to the obvious discrepancy between the pleasure of
poetry and the sorrows of human life. But he does not therefore “moralize”
his song. He could collapse the inner room out of guilt for having been
given it; instead, he constructs equivalent stanza rooms that are efficacious
in qualified but surprising ways. at guilt, as Harold Bloom has claimed
“is not a Merrillean emotion” (), can be proven by the grace with which
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it is touched on and evaded in this one brief poem. To Merrill, a greater
fallacy lies in the supposition that immolating pleasure softens reality or
tames chaos; instead, it is the augmentation of pleasure by means of rich
and knowing language that does sometimes “bear fruit.”
Of course all intimate poetry, all private poetry carries an inherent
paradox: it speaks publicly. Intimate poems, love lyrics, “inner room”
poems only pretend to have four walls, to be private enclosures. As in
the theatre, one wall is removed, representing by its absence the reader’s
access. Something particular is thus made symbolic, something private
made qualifiedly public. Barbara Hardy writes of this as a species of
“catharsis; not the catharsis of tragedy in which pity and fear are summoned
and dispelled, but a lyric catharsis in which private or secret feelings are
released in public vestments” ().
e Inner Room acknowledges lyric poetry’s paradoxical publicity
by merging the image of the inner room with insistent emphasis on the
images and language of the stage. is is particularly true in “A Room at
the Heart of ings” where references to the actor and “the role he studies,”
to the curtain line, to performance art, stolen scenes, aside, soliloquies,
and the theater-in-the-round are scattered throughout the poem’s seven
sonnet sections. e poem begins by establishing spatial propriety,
describing a room both exotic and intimate, “half-seen / rough the gilt
palm-fronds of Rue Messaline.” Because the sentence fragments used to
describe the room are like stage directions, it is at once recognizable as
a locus of fiction. Like the furnishings of the room they describe, these
directions are suggestive by reason of their sparsity:
Sparse furnishings: work table, lamp, two chairs,
Double bed, water closet, fourteen stairs;
Six windows, breathing spaces in the plot,
Between its couplings, to enjoy or not.
A poster—Carnival’s white eyeless faces.
e ceiling fan. ( )
e noun clauses, by withholding a verb, seem especially anticipatory: this
is an atmospheric setting, a place for something mysterious to happen, a
room with its fourth wall removed. e room equates interiority with
art: like a stage set upon which a curtain has risen, it focuses attention
by selection. is is not the world: it is “a room at the heart of things.” By
virtue of its interiority, its particularity, and its departure from randomness, “a room” has unquestioned priority over the “things” that surround
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it. By virtue of its half-hiddenness it seems rife with sexual implication.
To stand outside this room and look in is to anticipate the unfolding
dramatics of a play, in this case, the always interanimated “play” of eros and
poesis.
is “room at the heart of things,” which focuses and enables human
presence by means of spatial and poetic proprieties, is also the subject of
another sonnet section:
ose ivory towers were bric-a-brac. One flight
Of wooden steps, one slapdash coat of white,
of the interior
self, the world
we inhabit in
Moth hallucinates and cat outstares
e glamour of dimensions never theirs.
thought, fantasy,
Its tenant treads a measure, lights a joint,
Drawing perspective to the vanishing point
dream, or in
Inside his head. ( –)
So compelling does Merrill find the glowing inner room that phrases often
employed to damn the lyric as motivated by escapism and sentimentality
are transformed by him and lose their pejorative force. “ose ivory towers were bric-a-brac,” he concedes (emphasis added). It appears to him
miraculous rather than contemptible that just a few stage props and a
“slapdash coat of paint” can make a place out of surrounding space—here,
a room like a hovering, contained, and glowing , a locus of suspense,
possibility, vitality. e rooms where human action takes place have at
times this kind of “glamor of dimensions,” which Merrill taps by imagining
the mesmerized attention of moth and cat to light. e room is a spatial
model of the interior world of the self, the world we inhabit in thought,
fantasy, dream, or in poetic art. Further, the inhabitant of this glowing sonnet has arranged the things of the outer world, by means of spellbinding
“measure” (and by means of marijuana), into a perspective that draws “to
the vanishing point inside his head.” He is momentarily centre of the world
and able to view things in aligned relationship. Well-drawn perspectives
can produce a “here” where otherwise dissolving vows endure, where faith
with ephemeral things is kept—in short, where art is allowed its function
of preservation:
James Merrill’s Inner Rooms | 
35
spatial model
world of the
Sets the room hovering like a UFO
At treetop level. Spellbound by the glow,
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The room is a
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poetic art.
Here vows endure beyond
Earshot of lovers who dissolved their bond;
Whitewash keeps faith with tenements of dew
Already atomized to midnight blue;
And Gravity’s mask floats—at Phase 
Oblivion-bright—above the stolen scene. ( –)
Like a benediction, the full moon of Yeats’s Phase  floats above this
“stolen scene”—this sonnet room made from bric-a-brac, this fiction of
place. According to A Vision, in Phase , “the poem, the painting, the
reverie has been sufficient of itself … contemplation and desire, united
into one, inhabit a world where every beloved image has bodily form, and
every bodily form is loved” (–).
e depiction of the sexual act in the next sonnet makes it seem distinctly central, the poem around which the other sections “revolve like
planets around a bright idea” (McClatchy ). It seems fitting that in a
poem entitled “A Room at the Heart of ings,” central to a collection
entitled e Inner Room, there should lie embedded a section in which
two people are making love.
Sexual congress, by some combination of tradition and instinct, is usually defined in western societies by intimacy and privacy. e sexual act by
itself can make a milieu intérieur: it can cause space and time to acquire
distinct and concentrated contours. Partly because artists value so highly
the strange imperatives of desire, its exquisite modesty and distrust, they
approach describing it with tact and trepidation. Since words are so apt to
compromise the subject in the very act of revealing it, erring on the side of
evasion and silence often seems preferable to erring on the side of obscenity, that blunt and damaging estrangement from the flesh. And yet Merrill
does risk the unseemly in “raising the curtain,” or removing the fourth wall
on this remarkable inner room, on these delirious goings-on:
Actor and lover, contemplate the act
So-called of darkness: touch that wrestles tact,
Bedsprings whose babble drowns the hearing, sight
at lids itself, gone underground. Torchlight
Gliding down narrow, redly glimmering veins,
Cell by cell the celebrant attains
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A chamber where arcane translucence
Of god-as-mortal bring him to his knees.
Words, words. Yet these and others.…
Choreograph the passage from complex
Clairvoyance to some ultimate blind x,
Raw luster, rendering its human guise ... ( )
But how does the poet translate sexual experience into words? Merrill’s
rendering is uncommonly wordy, as if he were attempting to mime the
rush and dazzle of sensation by unleashing a torrent of words and allusions.
Hamlet’s disdainful phrase “words, words” implies that language is not
only inadequate but presumptuous in such a situation. But the evidence
of this sonnet (and the entire history of erotic poetry) is that there is no
end to the effort to say what sex is like. us does metaphor take its place
as a rich resource for conveying a sense of human sexual experience.
For Merrill, metaphor renders the experience of sexual pleasure as a
choreographed “passage from complex / Clairvoyance to some ultimate
blind x.” is “x” serves Merrill’s purpose similarly to the way “X” serves
Wallace Stevens’s purpose in his poem “e Motive for Metaphor.” Merrill’s “x” (“ultimate, blind”) stands for the inexpressible in human experience, especially the wordless point of great intensity which is sexual climax.
Stevens’s “X” (“vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant”) stands for inexpressible
and unadorned reality. In both cases, a kind of frisson is delivered by the
refusal of “x” to communicate. Metaphor, and by extension, all language,
exists both to reach “x”—to “choreograph the passage” to it—and to
provide a return from x’s extremity and ineffability with something communicable. In Merrill’s inner room, partially exposed to our view, sexuality and language perform these intimate rites. ere, a much desired
consummation takes place: as Merrill describes it elsewhere: “Truth asks
/ Just this once to sleep with fiction, mask / Of tears and laughter on the
moonstruck page” ( ).
e following sonnet concerns a natural vision renewed by erotic
satisfaction. e protagonist sees and hears the palm trees outside his
window, delivering a hush of peace:
By twos at moonset, palm trees, up from seeds
Big as a child’s heart, whisper their asides—
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Glittery, fanlike, alternating, slow
Pointers in the art of how to grow! ( –)
Merrill delivers these lines in an altogether different mode and register
from the charged and turgid lines that precede them. e “asides” whispered by the trees in their comparative quiet and simplicity shift attention
from centre to periphery, from bed to window, from inner immensities
to outer ones. e dispassion of the palms’ perspective does not chill the
passion of the inner room, but it does render it less febrile and less urgent.
e trees in their natural coupling, their foliate symmetry, their moonlit
glitter, and their childlike bigness of heart, are supremely fit for the office
of whispering witness to acts of intimacy. ey speak to the Merrillean
protagonist of his own concerns, delivering sotto voce their collaboration
and permission.
e subject of the palms’ “asides” is the “art of growing,” a concept
which is typical of Merrill. e palm tree has delivered pointers in the “art
of growing” at other key points in his poetry, most especially at the end of
“Lost in Translation,” where Merrill renders Valéry’s “Palme” with telling
autobiographical and poetical gains and losses:
And in that loss a self-effacing tree,
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
To shade and fiber, milk and memory. ( )
It is perhaps just such a “lesson” of loss and struggle, self-effacement and
transformation that the two palm trees, “up from seeds” whisper outside
the window of Merrill’s inner room. He repeats in this sonnet the crucial
word “rustle”(“—Whence this rustle, this expectant stir?”) to vocalize once
again the effaced homophonic “wrestle,” thus transforming via language
the struggles of life, the work of writing poetry, the grapplings of the sexual
embrace. Whatever in these is waste, mere wrestle and strain and expense
of spirit, also secretly feeds the “avid roots” of eventual rustling: “shade
and fiber, milk and memory.”
e palm corroborates, in its version of the resurrection myth, a similar
capacity of the human organism for renewal. is capacity is periodically
enhanced by the intimacy and sexual release enjoyed in inner rooms. “is
innermost quantum,” writes Merrill, “fuels the self, renews it; also, in ways
a mystic would understand, effaces it” ( x). e “actor” emergent from
the inner room has acquired there a renewed competence both in self and
in those effacements of self which are his roles. When he “steps forth” he
does so only to speak about the value of interiority, about “the room at
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heart” which “is small, but to the point.” He quotes himself, making a last
version of the stage metaphor with new variations and insights:
Innumerable aisles
The room
Converge upon its theater-in-the-round’s
Revolving choirs and footlit stamping grounds.
becomes a
shining stage
Only far out, where the circumference
Grazes the void, does act approach nonsense
at the center of
And sense itself—seats cramped, sightlines askew—
Matter not a speck. Out there the You
innumerable
And I, diffracted by the moiré grid
Have yet to meet (or waffled when they did!),
converging
aisles.
But here, made room for, bare hypothesis
—rough swordplay or soliloquy or kiss
The whole
Emitting speed-of-light particulars—
Proves itself in the bright way of stars. ( )
is abstracted
Here, the configuration of the stage as a kind of room with one wall
removed is abandoned in favour of an alternate architectural configuration: that of the theater-in-the-round. Kent van den Berg writes of the
metaphoric implications of this other type of stage: “the acting area could
also be perceived as part of the circular space defined by the auditorium.
As John Webster says ‘the actor is the center’ and the audience is the
circumference” (). Centre and circumference are precisely the spatial
oppositions with which Merrill is here concerned and which pervade his
work generally.³ e room becomes a shining stage at the centre of innumerable converging aisles. e whole is abstracted almost to geometry
and seen as if from far above.
e likelihood of “the You / And I” actually meeting depends entirely
on where on that converging grid of aisles they find themselves. e
 Similarly, the Sandover trilogy offers a sumptuous example of the value of
centrality (as opposed to “circumference”) with its inner room co-ordinates
converging over a table with a Ouija Board.  and  are not travelers to
outer space, to heaven, to the underworld or any other kind of “out there.” But
trooping to their room come all the missing—the dead friends and poets, the
fabulous creatures of legend and myth, the vanished races. Indeed, one of these
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almost to
geometry and
seen as if from
far above.
centre amounts to a kind of axis mundi, a familiar “stamping ground.” It
enables convergence, even that merger of “the you and I” we call sexual
intercourse. It certainly enables the commingling of that other “you and
I”—writer and reader. Just as the writer is on some level the audience of
his own “performance,” the reader steps, on some level, onto the inner
room “stage” of the poem, its field of symbolic action. ey meet, so to
speak, under the auspices of bounded and coherent space.
e circumference, on the other hand, is a stranger field: it is dark; it
“grazes the void”; it turns acts into nonsense and takes the consequence
out of sense. Worse, “out there,” the “you and I” might never meet, missing each other because of “waffling” or “diffraction”—the incoherence
and askewedness that characterize “lines” the further they move from
centrality’s nodic pull. ere the “grid” loses its uniformity and its capacity for trustable localizing of points, becomes wavy and uncertain. e
appellation “moiré grid” expresses both the disorientation and the lack
of freedom endemic to unstable linearity.
But in the inner rooms of poetry, the meeting of you and I is “made
room for.” “You and I” can form a “bare hypothesis,” predicated on conventional sayings and doings—”swordplay or soliloquy and kiss”—and
confer visibility, worth, being on each other. is hypothesis is, of course,
of precarious substantiality: it “proves” itself only “in the bright way of
stars.” Stars, as we all must now accept, may at their source be null and void,
burnt out, dead. But it is, after all, starlight that stands between ourselves
and that supposed oblivion. e “hypothesis” upon which all fiction rests
is, like starlight, illusory, but bright, “particular,” and available. Bachelard
wrote that interior spaces provide “proofs or illusions of stability” ().
One might say that the “constant” stars and “well-wrought” poems have
done, and can do, the same.
In e Inner Room, whenever Merrill wishes to portray a “heaven,” he
invariably imagines a meeting of “the You and I” in a vividly detailed spatial
confesses in tribute to the intimacy of their room: “I SHD TELL U YR RED
ROOM / SHINES WE CIRCLE IT WE ARE WARMED BY IT” (S ). And,
although the “stamping grounds” of Sandover shift to different homes and habitats, each of these is carefully established in its full spatial propriety. e agency
of meeting is human and place-bound; it cannot (for Merrill) be otherworldly.
Any suggestion that  or  should meet their “friends” elsewhere than in their
own rooms implies death and is met with appropriate reluctance and distrust.
Never travelers in time or space, the two in their various houses act instead as
hosts to time and space, to the dead and to the living. ey elevate “meeting”
into a succession of tête-à-têtes, seminars, parties, salon gatherings, and ultimately an intimate poetry reading (of Sandover itself ).
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enclosure. “Declaration Day,” for instance, depicts the lovely slow day-long
progress of two lovers toward a room and toward each other:
Down even the dim hall they burn.
A door just floats ajar.
e stillness trembles like a star.
A wish. Come true? Here’s where to learn.
Unnoticed, evening falls. Night falls.
In one another’s glow
Foreshadowed attributes take slow
Possession of the old, primed walls. ( )
eir convergence acquires a dreamy fervent inevitability; they create in
the room a glow of mutual desire, for which the very walls, by long association with human meeting, are “primed.”
Another “heaven,” this time imagined as a meeting of friends rather
than lovers, concludes the poem “Losing the Marbles.” e underlying
joke shared throughout the poem is that Merrill is losing his “marbles,”
that is, his memory. It is typical of Merrill that he should take comfort in
his loss from the fact that he will need his friends and lovers more, and
will appreciate their kind ability to “deduce from one dactyl” all that he
had meant to say, as they “fill[] the sorry spaces / With pattern and intent.”
is dependence is to Merrill a prized one, even a trope for homecoming.
Indeed, to replace his “lost marbles,” one of his friends gives Merrill for his
birthday a “clicking pouch” of every kind of marble imaginable:
… targets and strikers,
Aggies and rainbows, the opaque chalk-red ones,
Clear ones with -like wisps inside,
Others like polar tempest vitrified.…
With this gift Merrill creates a heaven of here and now that reflects the
sky’s “cloudy brilliances” but improves immeasurably upon them:
ese [the marbles] I’ve embedded at random
in the deck-slats
Around the pool. (e pool!—compact, blue, dancing,
Lit-from-beneath oubliette.) By night their sparkle
Repeats the garden lights, or moon- or starlight,
Tinily underfoot, as though the very
Here and now were becoming a kind of heaven
To sit in, talking, largely mindless of
e risen, cloudy brilliances above. ( )
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Perhaps never was a guest’s gift more imaginatively incorporated into the
fabric of an evening, embedded into the very floor, to add to the ambient
lighting. e gift given to soften the terrible realities of aging are used to
make a charmed circle for Merrill and his “belated few” to sit in, talking.
is “room” glows from many sources and reflections—marbles, pool,
garden lights, moon, stars—making plausible Merrill’s hope that his
current memory loss and eventual death might be like graceful, gradual,
and “dreamy blinkings-out… / Capital punishment, / Yes, but of utmost
clemency.” One can almost imagine such a mild and merciful “end” given
the self-delighting poetry with which this poem concludes.
While e Inner Room contains some of Merrill’s most compelling
and successful poems of love and friendship, charged with erotic assurance, it also contains poems with death as their spring, poems which spin
themselves around the ache of losing friends and lovers, around fear and
foreboding, and the humiliations of aging. Poems of sexual intensity and
vital friendship are clustered near the front of the collection and include
“Little Fallacy,” “Declaration Day,” “Morning Glory,” “Serenade,” “David’s
Watercolor,” “e Parnassians,” “Hindu Illumination,” “Ginger Beef,” and
“A Room at the Heart of ings,” all poems which commingle erotic, lyric,
and spatial intensity. Near the centre of the book, with “Dead Center,” “Losing the Marbles,” and “Prose of Departure,” the poetry begins to confront
more directly the discomfiting energies of death. In these poems spatial
propriety is more uneasily held, self-possession is more at risk, and context
is felt more acutely as a dissevering and dissipating force. Context becomes
like the storm in “Losing the Marbles,” which drives into the room to bleed
with rainwater a manuscript worksheet.
In “Losing the Marbles” the manuscript’s “long work of knowing and
hard play of wit” are restored to full stanzaic integrity with the help of
friends, just as the “lost marbles” are ingeniously replaced, as we have seen.
Merrill, as admirers and disparagers point out, has a “predilection for the
happy ending” (Yenser ). is is part and parcel of his drive to write
until he arrives at light. Many of his poems achieve closural amplitude by
imagining spatial enclosures suffused with light.
Along the passage toward light and unity, however, the poet takes
some unflinching glimpses into the heart of darkness. It seems hard to
Merrill that the privileged enclosures of poetry and love should provide
refuge but not immunity from sickness and death, which are capricious,
indefatigable, and at large in the world.  is the current literal and
metaphoric manifestation of death, capable of invading the propriety
of the inner room, deeply entangling itself with sexuality, intimacy, and
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love. “References to … our general fear of the  epidemic are scattered
throughout,” writes Karen A. Weisman, “sometimes in unison with an
exploration of the value of art” (). McClatchy notes that “the sickness
and death of a friend back home is the shadow over travels in Japan [and]
the text of ‘Prose of Departure’” (). In this long prose poem interspersed
with haiku, the reader comes upon an undisguised seizure of panic arising out of weeks of simmering fear. Here, the “room” is at the core of an
unrelenting “maelstrom.” is Hiroshima-like context works against the
containment of stanza form and the possible consolations of “good sense,”
tenderness, and love:
Tests, cultures ... Weeks from
One to the next. at outer
rim of the maelstrom
contain its
insights in
tries to convert
“knowledge”
into “wisdom”
Awake—who? why here?
what room was this?—till habit
shaded the lit fear.
through
“You’re not dying! You’ve been reading too much Proust, that’s
all! I could be dying too—have you thought of that, J M?—
except that I don’t happen to be sick, and neither do you. What
we are suffering are sympathetic aches and pains. Guilt, if you
like, over staying alive. Four friends have died since December,
now Paul’s back at the Clinic. You were right,”—the dying Paul,
what else?—”we should have scrapped the trip as soon as we
heard. But God! even if you and I were on the way out, wouldn’t
we still fight to live a bit first, fully and joyously?”
Such good sense. I want to bow, touch my forehead to the
straw mat. Instead: “Fight? Like this morning? We can live or
die without another one of those, thank you.” Mutual glares.
( )
It is little wonder that, throughout their travels, the protagonists seek
refuge from such withering knowledge, just as the prose struggles to
contain its insights in rhyming haiku, tries to convert “knowledge” into
“wisdom” through personal use of that wise and ancient form. “Knowing” is
so ominous in this piece; it adds to the usual ignorable certainty of mortality the unignorable fact of an impending date. Because in Japan the “local
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struggles to
rhyming haiku,
hardly moved. Its core
at nightmare speed churned onward,
a devolving roar:
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personal use of
that wise and
ancient form.
muse” employs haiku as her form of “conscious evasion,” Merrill tries to
tap this form for its incantatory momentary magic:
I need a form of conscious evasion, that at best permits odd
moments when the subject
looking elsewhere strays
into a local muse’s
number-benumbed gaze
—fixed there, ticking off syllables, until she blinks and the
wave breaks. ( )
Fragile haiku recall with heartsick irony the haiku-like stanzas of “Little
Fallacy” which held each other in balanced confederacy. ese little poems
of arrival barely hold their own in the surrounding, louder prose of imminent “departure.”
Awakening in glitzy hotel rooms, haunted by the thought of their
distant sick friend, these travelers are attracted time and again to images
of Japanese interiority, however incompletely understood or accessible.
ey admire a friend’s “bit of our planet. Two midget rooms, utilitarian alcove, no trace of clutter.” ey see people establishing an “instant
‘room’” in a graveyard by shedding their shoes at a prescribed circumference; they spend afternoons at the Noh theatre observing actors entering
“the realms of legend and artifice, to become ‘a something else thereby,’”
with Donne-like alchemy. In one section, entitled “Sanctum,” they find
themselves kneeling before a religious “inner room,” watching a ceremony
conducted by an abbot and some young priests. is “candlelit bower of
bliss” seems at first a rather tacky arrangement, describable with throwaway literary allusions:
He [the abbot] faces a small gold pagoda flanked by big gold
lotus trees overhung by tinkling pendants of gold. Do such
arrangements please a blackened image deep within? To us
they look like Odette’s first drawing room (before Swann takes
charge of her taste) lit up for a party, or the Maison Dorée he
imagines as the scene of her infidelities. ( )
But when they are invited to participate, to add their as-yet-unburned
incense to the general pile of ash, they lose, despite themselves, their
condescension and skepticism:
Still, when the abbot turns, and with a gesture invites us to
place incense upon the brazier already full of warm, fragrant
ash, someone—myself perhaps—tries vainly
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life— ( )
to hold back a queer
sob. Inhaling the holy
smoke, praying for dear
eir casual tourism briefly flares into profundity, as they recognize a
place propitious for prayer. Oddly and touchingly the word “life” with
its irresolute dash of punctuation, flees the haiku. All the dearer for its
evanescence, “life” floats unsupported and uncontained on the page. Will
prayer capture the fugitive “life” if poetry cannot? Having found a way in
to the sanctum of Japanese wisdom, the two travelers are humbled by its
eloquent, unreassuring relevance to their own concerns. at “life” will
be kept rather than lost, is immensely uncertain; the best one can hope is
to hold it within praying distance.
Two of e Inner Room’s final poems are elegies for Merrill’s friend,
David Kalstone, who died in . “Investiture at Cecconi’s” conveys a
dream in which convergences of many kinds are magically effected in
the small back room of a tailor’s shop. Merrill receives there a glistening white silk robe of “Oriental mourning,” commissioned for him by his
friend—”miles away, sick, fearful,” who has “yet arranged this / heartstopping present.” e poem makes an inner room in which the two friends
are still in touch despite distance and impending death, still linked by love
and a Venetian tailor. ere, Kalstone can still confer on the poet a loving
“present” meant to assuage his future grief.
e other elegy, “Farewell Performance,” is crucial to the collection not
because it celebrates spatial and poetic privilege but precisely because it
is not such a poem. Commemorating a ritual of letting go, rather than of
gathering or keeping, it describes the day when Merrill and a companion
rowed out to sea to scatter the ashes of Kalstone’s body.
e poem begins with a statement about the curative powers of art that
is so reductive as to almost contradict itself. It repeats tonelessly what it
suddenly fails to believe: “Art. It cures affliction.” is is surely one of the
assumptions of Merrill’s entire oeuvre, and yet here, under the pressure
of grief, it reads like a useless bromide. Merrill, an established poet who
has dealt expansively and “curatively” with “affliction,” here again finds
himself a dilettante in the face of it.
In deference to Kalstone’s passion for ballet and in keeping with the
collection’s theatrical motif, Merrill imagines Kalstone’s passing in terms
of ballet and its particular mode of making the “common lot” into “a pure,
brief gold.” Many, many times during one lifetime can art renew and effect
a “sea change” within those who call the dancers back with enthusiastic
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“bravos!” Merrill himself has wielded such a “wand,” has shouted in such
an audience, has admired the capacities in this regard of Proust, for one.
Proust transformed the “painful sum of things,” repeatedly in his “one dim
room,” until “the world will have put on a thin gold mask” ( –).
Transient gilding is Merrill’s sign for transmutations by art’s “limber
alembics” which can all but obviate, with their inspired repetitions, the
reality of death.
But there does eventually come a time when the performance is over
and “you are gone.” e evocation of the ballet scene is also a reminiscence
of shared aesthetic pleasure, times that will now never again be repeated.
Merrill’s poetry, particularly the Sandover trilogy, keeps “calling back” the
dead, in a sense, for one more encore. In this poem, however, it is precisely
that “in a sense” which he confronts and grieves about. Kalstone’s death
has shown him in a renewed way that death is that “bourne from which no
traveller returns” except metaphorically, and the poem broods on its own
suspicion that metaphor isn’t good enough. It is like trying to reassemble
the entire living person from the “ten or twelve light handfuls [of ] mortal
gravel” that he has been expertly and cleanly reduced to:
The evocation
of the ballet
scene is also a
reminiscence of
shared aesthetic
pleasure, times
that will now
never again be
You are gone. You’d caught like a cold their airy
lust for essence. Now, in this furnace parched to
ten or twelve light handfuls, a mortal gravel
sifted through fingers,
repeated.
coarse yet grayly glimmering sublimate of
palace days, Straus, Sidney, the lover’s plaintive
Can’t we just be friends? which your breakfast phone call
clothed in amusement,
this is what we paddled a neighbor’s dinghy
out to scatter … ( )
Merrill’s poetic powers are formidable, however, and his dramatic inclinations at the ready. He can make the “gruel of selfhood” assume a composite
meaning, a “manlike shape.” He can portray the sky as lighted artistically
for this “farewell performance”:
Past
sunny, fluent soundings that gruel of selfhood
taking manlike shape for one last jeté on
ghostly—wait, ah!—point into darkness vanished.
High up, a gull’s wings
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clapped. e house lights (always supposing, caro,
Earth remains your house) at their brightest set the
scene for good: true colors, the sun-warm hand to
cover my wet one.…
Back they come. How you would have loved it. We in
turn have risen. Pity and terror done with,
programs furled, lips parted, we jostle forward
eager to hail them,
more, to join the troupe—will a friend enroll us
one fine day? ( –)
e language is tender and full of enthusiasm; it tries to provide aesthetic
reassurance, to purge pity and terror. is seems a majestic farewell, colluded in by earth and sky, and by the two loving live friends who entrust
their dead friend to a disappearance into this “house”—just Earth, which,
after all, has always been his house. ere is comfort in knowing that this
“scene” of natural happenstance and human ritual would have been pleasing to Kalstone, had he been a participant of a different sort.
Yet, at a last-minute juncture, the poet and his friend, more than willing to see Kalstone companionably to the border, are chillingly waylaid by
returning dancer spirits who have seen what they cannot, gone closer to
the border than they can manage. e fine language, the welling euphoria
evaporate mid-stanza; the whole fictional apparatus self-destructs:
Strange, though. For up close their magic
self-destructs. Pale, dripping, with downcast eyes they’ve
seen where it led you. ( )
Doubt and fear of an inhuman liminality invade the poet’s reading of
the uncommunicative spirits, with their “downcast eyes.” e unknown
and unimaginable place deserves aversion of the eyes and silence; it is
a “bourne” not to be delved, not to be described. ese “pale, dripping”
spectres offer nothing but a mute witness so impressive that the poet can
do nothing but end his poem, making no renewed attempt to marshal aesthetic comforts. For Merrill, this is a drastically unresolved and unnerving
ending. He has described his usual practice of ending as endeavouring not
to break off at the lowest point. Instead “something affirmative had to be
made out of it … you don’t end pieces with a dissonance” ( ). is poem,
however, strands the protagonists at sea in a borrowed dinghy, without a
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stratagem, without a hint of homecoming. It ends with heartache and loss,
and with silent respect for the superior finality of death.
e elegy for David Kalstone escapes the values of interiority, spatial
propriety, and formal consolation that the collection otherwise celebrates
in poem after poem. Merrill, because his talents and instincts are for keeping, gathering, painstaking attention, and intricate binding, can write occasional poems of loss, severance, and surrender that are especially affecting.
Twice in e Inner Room a ritual of emptying a box containing a friend’s
ashes into a body of water is enacted. One, of course, is the scattering of
David Kalstone’s ashes in “Farewell Performance.” e other, from “Prose
of Departure” inscribes the poet’s reluctance to let go in its exact haiku
form, its enclosing parentheses, and its enveloping rhyme:
(Into the Sound, Paul,
we’d empty your own box, just
as black, just as small.) ( )
For this poet of enclosure and containment to empty and to scatter are last
acts of faith and love. He subverts his own lust for substance in a poignant
honouring of his dead friends’ “airy / lust for essence.” To release them
from the felicitous care of his “inner room” attentions and formalities to a
last formless unknown is a sorrow-enriched, bittersweet poetic duty.
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. e Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, .
Baird, James. “James Merrill’s Sound of Feeling: Language and Music.”
Southwest Review  (): –.
Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” James Merrill: Modern Critical Views. Ed.
Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, . –.
Hardy, Barbara. e Advantage of Lyric. Bloomington: Indiana , .
Heaney, Seamus. e Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose –.
New York: Farrar, .
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