The Iowa Review
Volume 1
Issue 3 Summer
1970
The Writing on the Void: The Poetry of W. S.
Merwin
Harvey Gross
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Gross, Harvey. "The Writing on the Void: The Poetry of W. S. Merwin." The Iowa Review 1.3 (1970): 92-106. Web.
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Article 29
on the Void:
The Writing
Gross
Harvey
The
S. Merwin
of W.
The Poetry
Eliot
poets,"
are
notes,
"abundance,
his early forties, Merwin
verse
is
six
and
of
and
steady
are seldom
which
"three qualities
we
Here
he
does
like
not,
complete
an even dozen
find
certainly
some
of
in the greatest
except
together
and
variety,
has published
translations.
opulent;
found
abundance.
his
in
Still
competence."
six of original
volumes:
talent
Merwin's
out
squeeze
contemporaries,
an undernourished
volume every decade. He is not always equally good and
there are only a few poems from his earlier books that I would care to antholo
gize. But when he is good, there is no one writing poetry today who approaches
him.
He
a
possesses
narrow
of
range
and
subjects
an
possibly
even
narrower
are also
find a full
range of tone. Yet within his limitations?which
strengths?we
forms
and
and
of
all
the
excursions, like
lyrical genres
representation
feelings:
"East of the Sun and West of the Moon," into the lush country of Keatsian nar
rative.
When
and
a critic
a
speaks of
poet's
matters
of metric
one knows what
aesthetic
effect;
parency
through
as the rhythmic
in
and
which
the
even
technical
trope,
or metaphor,
A
elements.
the
relating
whether
His voice,
parts
a
becomes
trans
metric,
his ways
articulates
rhythm
disparate
No
and
technique
the very ground of
perhaps
poet's
structure.
and
image
poetry
technique
We
wonder
might
shines.
projects his Weltanschauung.
of
think of technique
between
relationship
successful
of feeling,
ways
particular
metaphor
meaning
realization
we
competence,"
and
and deep
the most
the
of feeling; his metaphor
vision:
"complete
stanza,
is the exact
are
existence,
poetic
and
of
his rhythm, his
are
existence,
also
I am not describing the ontological status of all poems, of poetry as
his meaning.
such (whatever that may be) but formulating a theory of value. In the best
poems voice and vision are not merely facts for critical and technical analysis;
the how and the what coalesce into what simply is.
I thus am hard put to separate Merwin's
and
most
count
"Wish,"
amazing
performance,
and parse. We
that
uniforms
goric, we are merely
may
are
The
Lice.
name his
containers
method'
tropes; but
for
things
bright boys understanding
in his latest
from his subjects
lines
The
move
if we
contained
to no metric
point
and
out,
we
can
in his poem
Necessity
is alle
poetry:
92
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WISH
The star inmy
Hand is falling
All the uniforms know what's no use
May I bow to Necessity
To her hirelings
can
We
for
Janus,
tinas,
see
how
a
exhibits
ballads,
came
Merwin
musician
young
carols,
and
songs,
not
so well.
to write
out
trying
roundels:
the
his
His
first
instrument.
formal
verse
A Mask
volume,
He
ses
composes
the
of
early
fifties.
Merwin follows the prevailing fashion (it was a good fashion for poets to train
in: so different from the aggressive, politically dominated espousal of sincerity
and ignorance which characterizes the present mood).
In this first book Merwin
understands
the myriad possibilities
inherent in traditional English metric. He
handles well the freedom allowed by iambic verse; he exploits all the variations
possible within the restraint of the metrical code:
Hills are to be forgotten; the patter of speech
Must lilt upon flatness. The beasts will come;
And as they come, let one man, by the ark,
Drunken with desolation, his tongue
Rounding the full statement of the seasons,
Tremble
A
An
final
and
clatter
affirmation,
stare,
his
eyes
of doomed
to chase
seeming
to seek
crows,
an
a mercy,
island,
Or hills crested with towns, and to find only
Cities of cloud already crumbling.
"Dictum
"Drunken with
desolation,
sons
a
..."
has
Tennysonian
fluency and a too obvious
quantity
his
is no matter
of
: for a
Masque
of
Deluge"
tongue/Rounding
of
rotundity
vowel
the full statement
music,
a
perhaps
fitting of sound to sense. But Merwin's
pretty
sounds
or
onomatopoeic
effects.
of the sea
dangerous
ear for English
What
he
learned
(and what obviously became second nature to him) about metrical quantity
transformed into piercing quality in "The Asians Dying"
(from The Lice) :
is
Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything
learns his craft in A Mask for Janus. In his second volume, The
Dancing Bears, he searches out a number of themes. One is clearly signaled in a
title, "On the Subject of Poetry." The voice of the poem laments,
Merwin
93
Criticism
not
I do
at the end of the garden
is a man
There
who
To the wheel
slouches
listening
in the stream, only
revolving
is no wheel
There
father.
the world,
understand
By the millpond
to revolve.
there
He sits in the end of March, but he sits also
In the end of the garden; his hands are in
His pockets. It is not expectation
On which he is intent, nor yesterday
To which he listens. It is the wheel turning.
and
world;
as
reality
. . nor
".
aesthetic
construct;
imaginative
he
which
yesterday/To
the identity of poem
as
experience
not
separable
The poet is neither a prophet, a foreteller
which he is intent . . ." nor is he a his
from other kinds of human experience.
of the event: "It is not expectation/On
torian:
concerns:
themes here are familiar post-symbolist
Merwin's
. . ." He
listens.
simply
the
hears
turning
invents through the creative
the turning world which he magically
and incomprehensible
circular
of
Thus
the process appears
listening.
pedient
the ordinary logic of the poem's simple-minded persona:
wheel,
ex
to
I do not think I am fond, father,
Of the way inwhich always before he listens
He
Merwin's
turning
himself
prepares
recalls
wheel
by
. . .
listening.
".
Stevens'
. . essential
at
poem
the
center
of
things":
It is
As if the central poem became
And
Of
the
the world
the
as
other,
Espoused
each
central
if summer
morning.
the world,
one
each
poem,
a
was
spouse,
. . .
the mate
"A Primitive Like an Orb"
The
concern
with
magic
and
myth
as
creative
expedients
is intensified
in the
long poem which forms the center of The Dancing Bears, "East of the Sun and
West of the Moon." Merwin takes his title, much of his atmosphere, and some of
his actual language from the Norse fairy tale collected by Peter Asbj0rnsen and
"East of the Sun and West of the
retold in English by Sir George W. Dasent.
Moon" is a Norse version, with embellishments
such as Trolls and large White
tale of Cupid and Psyche. The story tells of a Beauty es
Bears, of Apuleius'
a Beastly Husband who
poused by
keeps both his identity and human appear
ance secret from his bride. Her mother naturally finds fault with such an un
conventional arrangement and questions the whole matter despite the fact that
who main
the Prince is bona fide royalty (transmogrified by a Wicked Witch)
tains
daughter
94
in
Beauty
to
and
sumptuous
appropriately
magical
Husband's
the
disobey
thou-shalt-not-peek
surroundings.
commandment:
Mother
urges
'Take better than advice, this end of candle
To light when he sleeps next you in the dark;
Only be careful that no drops fall.
The daughter lights the candle and gazes on the forbidden features of her mys
terious husband; taken with his beauty, she leans over and kisses his head:
Three times
The tallow folly from the candle fell....
(In Cupid and Psyche oil from Psyche's lamp spurts on the sleeping god's right
shoulder.) The prince awakes and scolds the girl for her impatient curiosity:
A
curious
not
you
'Why could
but
for one whole
patience
entertain
year,
For then had we been saved, and my spell broken.
Now this kingdom must shatter and I depart
For the wheeling castle of my stepmother
And
a
marry
a nose
with
princess
Imight have married
When
three
ells
long
you.'
She wakes the next morning and finds kingdom, castle, and her charmed lover
gone. Now she must begin the long quest to find the palace, "farther than dreams,
that lies/East of the sun and west of the moon
As she wends her dismal disenchanted way, through "a landscape of exceptions,"
a sententiously
bird (derived perhaps from Eliot's Burnt Norton)
moralizing
sings
out Merwin's
theme:
...
a
shadowy
a
Skeptical bird she settled in tree
And sang, 'AHmagic is but metaphor.'
and myth
Metaphor
man
izing
table
function
to make
"a
magic,
world.
penultimate
makes
the world
Merwin's
theme,
familiar
humanly
like a
nature
and
hu
in
in music,
so creates
the veri
doing
is inverted
in the
poem's
stanza:
'All
she
metaphor,'
Let
me
in that
said,
'is
magic.'
variety
be
real.
in a full restatement,
And in the poem's concluding lines we hear,
"East of the Sun and West of the Moon":
Now,
The
Her
even
Criticism
now,
over
the
rock
tropical, the lucid moon,
mortal
Creates
Let
in a turning lantern,
Me be diverted
95
of
in language of a particular
and
tolerable
phrase
out
mystery"
the embodiment
suffering and struggle; poetry,
guises
in the
eye
the image inwhich
hill
turning
of a man,
the world
is.
the moral
of
Our
moon
assumes
twin
the
masks
of
and
magic
'Oh, who
?What
be
would
for
shown,
handsels
gold
which
metaphor?masks
her known both to herself and to men. What she knows
and its imagined creatures and enchanted objects :
is myth,
make
the fairy story
save
in
analogy,
and marvelous
equerry?
As three hags sitting under an apple tree?'
in analogy, in myth
is
not possible; what
edge
and the usages of figurative
is humanized
is mythologized
Save
on Merwin's
menting
a Norse
of
adaptation
language, human knowl
and made poetry. Com
tale which
fairy
is,
in turn,
an
adap
notes that any telling of the
tation of a Latin fairy tale, the lady-in-the-moon
must
be
illuminated
the
of
myth
by
imagination, that the lamp or candle
light
in darkness
streaming
must
a different
discover
always
prince:
'But let the story be an improvisation
Continually, and through all repetition
Differ a little from itself, as though
Mistaken; and I a lady with foreign ways
To
therein
sing
own
to my
hair.'
"East of the Sun and West of the Moon" is characterized
richness of style and by passages which might have originated
Agnes
by brilliance and
in The Eve of St.
or Lamia:
Enormous with
blazed
That
Their eyes
the dark, a hall they entered
between
between
mirrors,
pilasters
Of yellow chrysolite; on walls of brass
Gold branches of dead genealogies
Clutched candles and wild torches whence
Rose still as brilliants. Under a fiery
tree with
Garnet
leaves
of
the flames
sunken
glass,
In a pool of sea-green beryl as in still water
A golden salmon hung. And no sound came.
with
Congruent
affective
the
resonance
thematic
poem's
ornament
obsession,
texture
the
metaphors
stanza.
of
every
of
We
and
obliqueness
note
elaborate
similes that are touched with mockery,
The
At
metaphors
moon
the
was
end
thin
as a
poor
. . .
of autumn
of humorous
lock directing
96
daughter
that ascribe to things human process,
The wall healed behind
tropes
man's
extravagance
the magic
that
them . . .
recall
Stevens
of "East of the Sun and West
(who
is the
controlling
of the Moon")
:
war
She was greeted
like a lost season.
she walked
Daylong
....
summer
in affluent
again
"East of the Sun and West of the Moon" seems only a qualified success. As a
philosophical poem about the nature of poetry and the relation of imagination to
it invites
reality,
the "formulations
a
maintained
Stevens'
with
comparison
of
midnight."
consistently
lovely
of
explorations
Merwin
sensed
Perhaps
aural
and
visual
the
that
fictive
although
it did
surface,
and
realm
the
not
poem
sustain
either a high level of narrative interest or the vigorous logic of intellectual argu
ment: it remains the isolated example of an extended poem in Merwin's body of
work.
in the Furnace
of The Drunk
(1960) are seascapes,
of fabled voyages. They take their tone and technique
Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" and are written in loosened
an irregular but subtly controlled
moves the lines
along
Merwin
have
(the two opening poems
always intrigued
journeys
rhythm. Mythic
of his first book are "Anabasis I" and "Anabasis II"); they are the metaphoric
motive power urging many of his poems. In his recent work the mythic
journey
(from
may be compressed into a single, startling image; here is "The Defeated"
The Moving Target) :
The first dozen poems
sailor's yarns, and poems
(it appears to me) from
blank verse metric which
Beyond surprise, my ribs start up from the ground.
After I had sunk, the waters went down.
The horizon Iwas making for runs through my eyes.
It has woven
its
nest
simple
among
bones.
my
The protagonist has gone down in the desert, pierced through by the distant
a bird. In "The Frozen Sea" (from The Drunk
horizon which is also, magically,
a white
in the Furnace),
the protagonists
and solid
(polar explorers) walk
ocean
I read
perience:
scrutable
"To
the
"The
become
Sea"
Frozen
Captain
whiteness
of
moral
agents
as
a
the radical
impulse
Thus
the
innocence
turn
American
evil.
way
classic
nearly
the whale.
absolutes?all
of
whichever
[where]
furious
Ahab's
from the world,
unmixed
south,
pure
we
parable
to
avenge
against
the
is
very
intolerable,
the
injury
American
and
desire
overwhelming
of Billy Budd,
goodness
of
. . ."
north.
turned/Was
to
the Calvinist
they
principles
American
ex
moral
confront
in
the
evil
extirpate
on
insistence
assert
purity
and
hypo
critical:
...
it was
not
any
light
From heaven that hurt our eyes, but
The whiteness
that we could not bear. It
Turned bloody in our carnal eyes. Virtues
That had borne us thus far turned on us, peopling
The lashed plains of our minds with hollow voices
Out of the snouted masks of beasts. Their
Guts would feed on God, they said.
The explorers continue
97
Criticism
their journey toward the absolute
south sustained by the
fierce pride of their inflexible convictions. They look neither to the right
of the whale, the whiteness
the whiteness bears them up. The whiteness
in
the
the
of
darkness
of
the
softly gleaming
sickening whiteness
brig,
The Marble Faun. The end of the journey through whiteness
brings
tragic insights, that
. . . how
World
we
small
were
around
the
whom
nor left;
of Billy
Hilda in
them to
howling
. . .
turned
but on
that they had not plucked out the frozen heart of the mystery of the world,
to go.
reaching the still point of absolute south, they had nowhere
poems in The Drunk in the Furnace, "No One" and "One-Eye" play in
"No One" speculates on the Last
triguing music on the theme of apocalypse.
shall
those
who
have
which
overtake
conspired in the death of God.
Judgment
On that final day
Two
. . .when
the wind
of
prophecy
Lifts its pitch, and over the drifting ash
At last the trump splits the sky,
No One should arise.
to consciousness
awakes
"One-Eye"
in the
. . . come
of
country
the
blind,
to them
Out of a saying. And chanting an anthem
Unto his one eye, to the dry
that their leaping fingers made
Accompaniment
Flicking round him like locusts in a cloud,
They
him
took
home
with
them.
lives, of course, as king in the realm of the unsighted. Around him the blind
. . ."
listen, "Amazed at his royalty, gaping like/Sockets.
They learn from him
the wonders of the visible world but he keeps them in blissful ignorance of im
is Coming:
pending catastrophe, the End Which
He
. . . the black
as
thumb
as a
big
Over their heads descending
Out of a quiet sky.
to describe the two books which succeed The Drunk in the
Target, and The Lice, is that they are written after the
One possible way
Furnace, The Moving
end;
the
poems
the
fifties
and marks
and
epigrammatic,
cies toward elegant
are
contain
they
stones. The Moving
crumbling
curbed.
line-stopped
The
are
(1963)
Target
breaks with
for Merwin.
advance
major
stylistic
above
concentrated.
all, powerfully
and prolix elaboration
formal
stanzas
and
fluid
on
scratched
messages
fragmentary
a
is in another
This
Merwin's
new
style
earlier
(the "Cansos" in The Dancing
meters
street
shards
are
replaced
and
the formal tradition of
by
a new,
rhythm and use of blank space to mark breathing pauses:
Today
98
valley
silently
is terse,
tenden
Bears)
frequently
I'm
Before
to that
coming
me
its
The bird of the end with
Colorless feet
Has
( "The
and
Themes
has
style
on windows
walked
concerns
of
Crossroads
poem
in
an
English,
etc."
)
new
in
indeed
Merwin's
epigram;
it new
expressive
capabilities.
and
re-appear
appear
and
the epigram
given
re-vitalized
Some
Target and The Lice are only three lines in
find what surely must be the most powerful
of the poems in both The Moving
we
length; in The Moving Target
one-line
the World,
for
epitaph
the
of
alienated
every
extremity:
SAVONAROLA
to endure my world and calling the failure
God, Iwill destroy yours.
Unable
of The Moving Target, its permanent
startling poetic accomplishment
in
Merwin's
inheres
ability to breathe life into the dry
imaginative achievement,
isWeltanschauung,
the pro
bones of metaphor. Earlier I noted that metaphor
a
The
The
of
The
world
of
world.
Lice)
Moving Target (and
jection
surrounding
is still and intense, its metaphors generating the familiarly strange (and strangely
The
ambience
familiar)
of
the
is our
'Surrealistic'
dream.
first
to
response
this
poem:
DEAD HAND
still nest in it like basilisks.
Temptations
till
the rings fall.
it
up
Hang
As we move
note
poets
times
that
what
as Neruda
Merwin,
metaphor
the metaphoric
through
seemed
initially
or
Perse)
St.-J.
in the manner
of
(a comparison
landscape
a
develops
such humorists
bludgeoned
of The Moving
surrealistic
programmatically
personal,
as S.
into clich?)
Target, we
(derived
numinous
from
quality.
J. Perelman,
a
drags
startled and kicking
such
Some
'dead'
from the
grave:
And
Or,
even
more
the hands of the clock still knock without
he
characteristically,
thesis. So frequently does Merwin
crosses
the
wires
of
entering.
perception
in
synaes
employ figures like these,
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle,
. . .
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
that
synaesthesis
becomes
a
persistent
style. At times Merwin
creating gratuitously daft effects;
Merwin's
99
Criticism
mannerism,
a
tick
in
the
physiognomy
of
just fools around with surprising juxtapositions,
at other times the juxtapositions fall into place
and we
have,
in this example,
something
akin to frozen hysteria:
Be here the flies from the house of the mapmaker
Walk on our letters I can tell
And the days hang medals between us
I have lit our room with a glove of yours be
Here I turn
name
your
Its one word
and
To
the
remembers
hour
Now
the
larger
effects
clauses
metaphor.
of meaning:
Be here
Walk
uses
Merwin
held
poetry
vary
silent
rest
...
letters
emptiness,
tension.
up expressive
for
performance
primarily
so on. But Merwin
and
I can
dynamics,
reader,
how
slightly impatient,
the printed page:
he
the
between
silence
of
his
expects
sometimes
. .
tell.
as Beethoven
to build
meant
moments
. . . the flies from the house of the
mapmaker
on our
time's
silence,
are
caesuras
The
of
is as startling
by syntax and not by meter,
In these lines rhythm, controlled
as
rhythm
annoyed,
Such
(in
where
usage,
the
makes
it
to
sound;
his
of
uses
later music)
can
reader
a
accelerate,
stop,
clear,
absolutely
a voice,
the
characterizes
course,
even
to
the
hesitating,
querulous,
speaks from the cold black and white
of
INVOCATION
The day hanging by its feet with
In
And
a hole
its voice
the light running into the sand
Here I am once again with my dry mouth
At the fountain of thistles
Preparing
to
sing.
complaint here is familiar and traditional: a master of
slightly disingenuous
tells
and
us, in poetry which belies his assertion, that he is
rhythm
language
neither ready nor competent to perform his office. Like the soprano who tells us
she is not in voice or the pianist who says he has not practiced all week, he pro
tests that his talents are unequal to his task. Words are of limited value; there is
an unreachable
in silence. But paradoxically
the poet must speak of
perfection
The
silence;
to
paraphrase
Sweeney,
he's
gotta
use
words
when
he
talks
to us.
The last poem in The Moving Target makes a number of implied
about the possibilities and impossibilities of a poetry of silence:
100
assertions
DAYBREAK
Again this procession of the speechless
me their words
Bringing
future
The
me
woke
its silence
with
I join the procession
An open doorway
me
Speaks for
Again
This poetry strives to move beyond language, to confront directly the phenome
no poetry beyond language; it
non
language reaches toward. There is, of course,
is
in
that
metaphor
the
his
reaches
poet
vision.
an
is
"Daybreak"
of
example
total synaesthesis; the entire poem tells us of a speechless procession of light,
of the new day (the future) with its wordless and undeniable
invitation, and of
an open space (doorway) which breaks into speech. All this does not make a
a
a poetic
plenitude of meaning. The
language alive with
poetry of silence but
the soundless nature of light and the
silence of "Daybreak" itself is metaphor;
calls ". . . epiphoric vitality, since
dumb future enforce what Philip Wheelwright
one
the compression of
[in synaesthesis] with that given
type of sense-impression
a different
by
of his avenues
stirs
sense-organ
sense
at once."*
The Moving
Person,
"Or
Target
place,
deformed,
this
the
to
reader
reflective
along
contemplation
two
of
or
grotesque,
character
confront
thing
or
sinister
on
gets
in a direct
avoids poems
generally
us
and
a bus
in
mode.
representational
transformations;
metaphoric
gestures
are
threatening:
an
with
razor.
open
..."
All
the
poems
delineate
world: after the
the eerie quality of behavior and feeling in a post-apocalyptic
end but before another beginning. We catch occasional glimpses
(as in a dream
or in the seemingly preternatural experience of d?j?-vu) of recognizable places.
The
poem
"The
Crossroads
of
the World
etc."
is about
New
York
City;
Merwin
offers certain specifics of place and time:
never have thought Iwould be born here
So late in the stone so long before morning
Iwould
Between
the
rivers
of
learning
salt
the city soon becomes an image for any city afflicted
type for the void at the end of history when
But
The bird of the end with
Colorless feet
Has
walked
on windows
by
time and ruin, a
its
. . .
The Lice (1967) continues the mode and mood of The Moving Target, but
finds his way to a
the thematic direction is more clearly articulated; Merwin
*
Metaphor and Reality (Indiana University Press, 1962) p. 76.
101
Criticism
of subjects suitable to his style. Or we might say he develops numerous
even (in the poem "The Last One") ecological?of
polemical,
aspects?political,
theme. A number of poems express the quality of moral life
the post-apocalyptic
in specific political protests but in sombre evocations of
in the last decade?not
variety
All
feeling.
of
Because
lative
is a very
its
of
achievement
. . .what
On
it
verse;
are
poplars
con
concern;
is Merwin's
Lice
a cumu
has
most
important
imitated.
widely
All the poet can do is to read
is a dead world.
five
the
The
concentration,
already
at the end of history
The world
of Merwin's
book: a set of sermons on a single
tightly written
expressive
collections
of
most
center
the
and
thematic
unlike
impact
an
astonishing
work:
to
close
very
stay
poems
The Lice
sequently,
text.
the
writing
. . .
the void.
("A Scale inMay")
in The Lice are dead, death, and
Perhaps the most frequently repeated words
silence; their repetition echoes in Merwin's twilit void. "The Hydra" begins with
this
assertion:
No no the dead have no brothers
The Hydra calls me but I am used to it
It calls me Everybody
I know
But
I am not sure who
He
clear.
is the
name
my
the Hydra
not
do
is in this poem,
of
Beast
many-headed
and
the
answer
but his mythic
and
Apocalypse
implications
seem
self-renew
Hercules'
ing and nearly unkillable antagonist; he is the recurring Creature of the
poet is used to his call; those who have gazed long into the abyss (as
notes) get accustomed to having the abyss gaze into them. The slangy
the Beast; even the Apocalypse
("but I am used to it") domesticates
bearable if regarded through ironic detachment. Or perhaps the poet
familiarity
becomes
is saying
so what?
a monster
to
under
the
Such
poem
some
the
apocalypse?as
Augustine
is no
news
to
see
sun."
irony relieves the pessimism
in the gnomic Anglo-Saxon
basic
"It
remarks,
End. The
Nietzsche
"Some Last Questions," a riddle
answers to
gives wild and whirling
of The Lice.
tradition,
:
questions
What
is the head
A. Ash
What
are
the
eyes
A. The wells have fallen in and have
Inhabitants
this
By
tomed
ing
words
102
time
we
are
used
to Merwin's
to his obsession with
to penetrate
the void:
. . .
brilliance
speech and silence,
in
metaphor
and with
as we
the difficulty
are
accus
of find
is the tongue
A. The black coat that fell off the wall
With sleeves trying to say something
What
Last
"Some
us
Questions"
brings
must
the silence
qualifications:
to
brink
the
broken
be
of
with
death
but
makes
words;
it
is not
some
a
necessary
con
sufficient
dition even in the city at the end of time :
is the silence
A. As though it had a right to more
What
remain; the sub
to the heavens:
Death must be mitigated
through the memory of those who
stance of the dead is translated, like the heroes of mythology,
are
Who
the
compatriots
the stars of bone
A. They make
music.
than
Merwin's
"Wish";
quoted
of "The Hydra"
interpretations
My
to be more
sight-readings,
recent
poetry
we
note
that
do not claim
and "Some Last Questions"
at
attempts
resists
be
may
of
outlines
general
or
paraphrase
uniforms
some
gaining
categorization.
for
metonymy
the
I
Earlier
the
military,
the poet wishes to
that Necessity may be allegoria for some higher process. When
. . .", he
he
would
"bow to Necessity not/To her hirelings
says
gladly yield his
to
substance
the
aggression.
hesitate
would
to
seasons,
the
is a possible
This
to
an
anti-war
poem.
in the same way
that Beethoven's
the force of destiny.
with
struggle
Fifth
emotion
Two of the most
Asians
"The
dramatizes
Dying,"
nature's
revenge
. . .made
protests
against
men
who
against
human
to be
their minds
up
propositional
is
It
hate
to human
a
and
sense. But
'about'
poem
"The Last One" and
"The
atrocities.
Last
One"
because
everywhere
why not
was
Everywhere
"The Asians Dying"
Russian
Punic
ines
both
the holocaust
we
The
Like
hope
may
possessors
columns
Peloponnesian
Criticism
so.
it is also about Napoleon's
War.
Merwin
carefully
move
smoke
come:
under
Death
everywhere
into the
they advance
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future
103
thought
of protest and the moralizing
piety of self
the voice of The Lice never raises itself above
a dark prophecy, classically understated. The
what we have all painfully learned and imag
never
of
they
in Viet Nam;
the
Wars,
the stylized rhetoric
righteous indignation; and because
a
whisper, "The Asians Dying" is
final strophe, mezzo piano, tells us
avoids
because
is 'about' the war
the
campaign,
theirs
I
moral
is 'about' man's
Symphony
in The Lice,
impressive performances
are
not
but
reading of the poem's
"Wish"
call
to nature
cosmos,
their
shadows
star
of me to say this but I hope Merwin does not stay
of The Lice. I catch, in some of his recently pub
It may be presumptuous
locked into the stylistic mode
lished
notes
verse,
are
dissonances
These
self-imitation.
of
in
inevitable
the work
of any highly prolific writer who develops an intensely original verbal quality;
and we have perhaps learned to expect the incredible virtuosity of a figure like
this:
And I look up but it is only
a head
Evening again the old hat without
The danger is that we may not see the poetry for the thickness of the meta
a sense of strain, of trying to infuse vitality into a language nearly
phor. There is
dead of exhaustion. The Lice is, of course, a book of elegies (Merwin has been
from
the
an
beginning,
elegiac
sometimes
but
poet);
Merwin's
voice
elegiac
sounds like a voice from the grave. He means it to be; it is tinged with irony and
In a poem from his first volume, "For a
modulated with comic self-deprecation.
answer is given:
Dissolving Music," the poet asks, "What shall be sung?" and this
all night raven,
all doom
woven,
none
forgiven,
no curse
ungraven,
no
at even,
peace
remnant
for leaven
notes have been necessarily
These
Merwin's
as
work
tionship,
remarks,
to Viet
not
"And
a translator
Namese
a
and
he has made
the adaptations
French
. . .
crude
and
of
come
not
from
Peruvian.
matter
I have
the
stylistic
to use
I have not considered
brief and selective.
relationship
languages
between
his
ranging
through
a delicate
is
It
obviously
'influence'
or
as
translations
direct
a way
verse
original
Spanish
and
subtle
and
rela
Merwin
inspiration.
of
and
off writ
touching
own. On the
ing that then became deliberately,
specially, or ostentatiously my
own
I
have
to
felt
and
translation
contrary,
my
writing more and
impelled
keep
more
sharply
While
separate."
agreeing
that
is every
Merwin
in his own style and
own voice,
speaking in his
some
inflection
from
lines
like
these:
of
emphasis
caught
clothed
Just the same itwould
to scare
or knock
a
notary
a nun
with
stone
inch
I wonder
own
his
man
if he has not
be delicious
a cut
dead
lily
with
It would be beautiful
to go through the streets with
shouting until I died of cold.
one
blow
of an
ear.
a green knife
(These lines are from Pablo Neruda in Merwin's own translation.) Perhaps we
can say (as Merwin reports Pound saying to him) that Neruda's work
proved
".
. . a means
104
of
. . .
sharpening
[his]
awareness
of
the
possibilities
of
his
own
Translation
language."
source of exotic
Merwin's
of
in
work
and
sound,
symbol,
an
neither
poet
easy
access
to
but rather a fresh appraisal
subject matter
its resources
and
the
offers
translation
reveals
nor
originality
of his own
a
language
rhythm.
him
"a
good
immersed
European"
in
tradi
tional culture. Similarly, his own poetry has little sense of the American region.
The scene of his lyrics is the Imperial City frozen into its moment of terror and
where
decay,
The thug on duty saysWhat would
He looks at his watch he lifts
out
Emptiness
scene
the
not
is nature
moon,
only
in a
suffused
and
star,
the vases
of
it up to examine
And holds
Or
you change
tree
but
the
where
sensibility,
roots
in
tangled
private
own
his
discovers
poet
sentient
land
the
recent writing
is in the City at the
scapes. Like Kafka the scene of Merwin's
End of Things, in that ubiquitous Country of Nowhere;
thus I have been tempted
or
to read Merwin's poems as allegories with point for point meanings
parables
with
or
political
social
Because
morals.
Merwin
does
not
we
particularize,
feel
the need to supply the full context. Again, like Kafka Merwin
is a symbolist in a
are
no
in
world emptied of God: where
believed
but merely
symbols
longer
sense
And
the
occasioned
and
the
of
by estrangement
terpreted.
spiritual agony
loss informs the prophetic voice which does not trumpet but quietly sings, sotto
voce,
After
and
of The
End.
the new dispensation;
the apocalypse,
the
unbelievers,
of
rewarding
the
after the destruction
remnant.
saving
of the spoilers
as
Merwin,
far
as
I can
tell from The Lice, believes both in the eternal circularity of history and some
toward a new world. Men will do evil again (being men);
possible movement
will
their
the war is
repeat
they
folly and again hold contemptible values. When
over,
Prayer
and
Merwin
To
cruelty
".
comments,
The
of
Powers
the
Of
oppressors,
. . we
This
will
all
enlist
after
World,
eloquently
gance
the
and
the
revolution,
cruelty
goes
indicting
in His
peasant,
the arrogance
concludes
I am bringing up my children to be you
After
The
again."
oppressed
on. I am
become
the
to
reluctant
.. .
oppressors
accuse
Merwin
and
the
of
cycle
positive
of
arro
thinking
but the very fact that he assumes the prophetic office indicates some hope that
his words will be heard. The movement
toward the new world may be only the
rats
in
of
their
"Unfinished Book of Kings" reports the
cages.
dry stirring
running
excited anticipation before the coming of a new dynasty; when it comes, it turns
or Tweedledee,
out to be "the last of the absences": Tweedledum
Lyndon John
son or Richard Nixon. "The
on the
of
the
extinct
lips
ground
prophets still lay
here
and
there
murmuring
So much
for
the
hair
of
the moon
. . ."
But the lips do go on murmuring
the magic of their metaphors. Apocalypse
and
or as Frank Kermode
cue from Wallace
End are also metaphors
his
(taking
Stevens) notes, actually sustaining imaginative fictions. The poet finds it useful
105
Criticism
to think he is living at the end of an
his dissolution. I would also suggest
lows (Eliot, Yeats, Pound, St.-John
their prophecies
tell us nothing we
particular
ficity which
those
who
guarantee
protection
has
contribution
their
even
revolution
own
the
for
destruction.
though
and
language
cleansed
rhythm
words
are
hell
of
under
it, and
Perhaps
thin armor
such
poetry
the
against
those
who
can
offer
enemy,
raw
all
of
it feels to live in the polity of the credibility
render how
make
a
been
era; he has, at the very least, the security of
that for Merwin and the line of poets he fol
Perse) The End has already taken place;
have not known for a long time. Merwin's
speci
gap, among
make
war
a measure
even
though
poet makes his ritual disclaimer:
And that my words are the garment of what
Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy
I shall never be
The Night of the Shirts
Oh pile of white
to breathe
is coming
shirts who
in your
shapes
toward
their
to carry
your
to appear
what
are
hearts
moving
here
garments
their days
what
troubles
beating
between
arms
you look upward through
each other saying nothing has happened
and it has gone away and is sleeping
same story
having told the
and we exist from within
eyes of the gods
you lie on your backs
and
the wounds
are not made
the blood has not heard
the boat has not turned to stone
and the dark wires to the bulb
are full of the voice of the unborn
numbers
to
of
the