A Symposium By David Baker, Meghan O’Rourke, Rosanna Warren, & Stanley Plumly | March/April 2017

W.S. Merwin

 

Erasure, Extinction, & The Preserved World

by David Baker

When W.H. Auden selected A Mask for Janus, in 1951, for the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, he noted in his introduction the “admirable respect for [the] traditions of poetic craftsmanship” this new poet, W.S. Merwin, enacted. Auden was no slouch. His first Yale choice, in 1946, was Joan Murray’s Poems, and before he finished his stint in 1958 with William Dickey’s Of the Festivity, he had shown the series’ most visionary selecting, picking such manuscripts as A Change of World, The Green Wall, Some Trees, A Crackling of Thorns. These are, you may recognize, the first books of Adrienne Rich, James Wright, John Ashbery, and John Hollander. Did you know that twice (three times, according to one source) Auden passed over a manuscript from one Sylvia Plath?

W.S. Merwin was twenty-four when A Mask for Janus appeared in 1952. (Plath, by the way, was nineteen.) Twenty-four, yet his work shimmered with the burnish of poetic formalism and the high literary tradition. He’d taken his degree as a scholarship student at Princeton, where he studied with R.P. Blackmur and roomed with Galway Kinnell. Can you imagine? Auden wrote at length about Merwin’s application of myth, and praised his finesse with such forms as the Spanish carol. Auden finished off his introduction with a passage from de Toqueville, on destiny: “The destinies of mankind—man himself… standing in the presence of Nature and of God, with his passions, his doubts, his rare prosperities, and inconceivable wretchedness—will become the chief… theme of poetry.” More about destiny in a minute.

It’s commonplace to find in Merwin’s work the demonstration of a powerful poetic in his books from the 1960s and early ’70s, his “second four books.” There’s no doubt of the surprise, the achieved and shocking originality of this work. It’s pretty amazing: to have begun with such acquiescence to the tradition, or perhaps such thorough apprenticeship, and to have arrived at The Lice, in 1967, with such masterful dissatisfaction or rejection of that tradition. Isn’t that eerily true of much of Merwin’s great generation? The early books of Wright and Rich, of Bly, Kinnell, just earlier of Brooks, writing their sonnets, sestinas, and blank-verse ballads, sound also like juvenile Georgian poets, obeying their immediate fathers Ransom, Wheelock, I.A. Richards. Can you think of a generation who made such drastic metamorphoses?

So, my first of three points in this consideration. Merwin’s work of the 1960s is a purposeful casting aside of his own academic, traditionalist poetry. Step by step he unwrites himself. He erases the inscriptions of self and the learned style of his young generation. Consider the opening quatrains of “Song,” the final poem in A Mask for Janus, with its archaic diction and syntax, its rhymed couplets and dutiful tetrameter:

Mirrors we lay wherein desire
Traded, by dark, conceits of fire;
As gardened minds whose delicacy
Could neither close with flesh nor flee,

Who watched by fire a bush inflect
What flame a window could reflect
Where dark and distance were control
So the leaves burned yet rested whole.…

And now, from The Moving Target in 1963, this final poem, “Daybreak”:

Again this procession of the speechless
Bringing me their words
The future woke me with its silence
I join the procession
An open doorway
Speaks for me
Again

I’ll say more about these changes shortly. But first a quick observation about developments within those first four books, changes harder to detect than the phoenix-like burst of new style—the deep image, the primitivist line, the naked word—that we find in his poems of the ’60s. In those first four books, published in a flurry from 1952 to 1960, Merwin seems to maintain a stiff academic obedience. But style and subject matter are already morphing, from the heightened familiar mythologies in A Mask for Janus and The Dancing Bears, to, in Green with Beasts and especially in The Drunk in the Furnace, a less arch formalism, disencumbered syntax, hints of a plainer diction, and subjects that include now sea tales, family portraits, and nature narratives. These are the foundational first steps of a quickening revisionism. You might see a less obvious casting off of gestural rhetoric. You might detect beginnings of a personal voice or story, though he was (and remains) far from the confessional revelations of those poets a decade older (Lowell, Berryman) or the younger Plath.

I mean to assert that from the beginning Merwin enacts a purposeful erasure of tactic and gesture, shifting away from the monolithic mythology of Western literary traditionalism: an absenting or erasing of presence, even of aspects of history. Even in that first book, he writes in a beautiful passage at the end of “Dictum: For a Masque of Deluge,” after seventy lines of stiff well-schooled impersonality, after a heavy allegorical retelling of the Flood myth, these lines:

A falling frond may seem all trees. If so
We know the tone of falling. We shall find
Dictions for rising, words for departure;
And time will be sufficient…
To teach an order and rehearse the days
Till the days are accomplished.…

It’s a moment of near prophecy, speaking now in future tense, hoping to create a new diction and its “words for departure.” These will be fundamental tropes in the coming great work.

And that great work arrives in 1963 with The Moving Target and extends through The Lice, The Carrier of Ladders, and Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment to The Compass Flower in 1977. I’ll resist a point-by-point look at Merwin’s achievements in these incredible fourteen years. Instead, within a single book, The Moving Target, written in about three years, we see his development virtually from one poem to the next, letting go of more, in Merwin’s art of absence and erasure.

The Moving Target consists of sixty-four poems arranged, roughly, in their order of composition. What evolves? A gradual erasure of capitalization and removal of punctuation (except white space), a radical loosening of the line, its regularity; but more deeply, a growing resistance to scholarly troping, dense conceits, and the archaic reiterations of familiar mythologies: a rebuttal of the formal markers of the era’s poetry. He is unwriting, and when he commences The Lice, his mature style has fully arrived. As Laurence Lieberman famously announced, “If there is any book today that has perfectly captured the peculiar spiritual agony of our time… and has transformed that agony into great art, it is W.S. Merwin’s The Lice.”

This is the moment of the birth of the contemporary deep image, the reversion to a primordial and primitivist poetic where “every memory is abandoned” (“The Finding of Reasons”). What is happening? Kinnell, Bly, and Wright are translating duende into English. Richard Howard is revealing the inventions of Roland Barthes and the French poststructuralists. Merwin is translating everything, as Ezra Pound advised the young Merwin to do, from Antonio Porchia and the essential (and essentialist) Jean Follain to all those proto-poetic “Asian figures,” as he calls them. It’s a purposeful meltdown of the firmament, not only in poetry, but culturally in its resistance to the war in Asia and the oppressions of a racist, materialist, misogynist zeitgeist. It’s the birth of a new age in the death of the old regime.

“Poetry is the orphan of silence,” writes Charles Simic in The New Naked Poetry, calling for a “devastating simplicity”: “There is a need here, an obsession with purity.” Kinnell: “The subject of the poem is the thing which dies. Poetry is the wasted breath.” And Merwin himself: “To recur in its purest forms… poetry seems to have to keep reverting to its naked condition, where it touches on all that is unrealized.” The naked condition describes the new poem’s stylistic aspirations, as well as its resistance of allegorical myth. “Go without ornament,” Merwin asserts in “Envoy from D’Aubigne,” “without showy garment.”

My second point is that in rejecting the old literary style and mythology, erasure becomes not just a tactic, but a trope. Not just a means, but a subject and a surrogate storyline. “We hurtle forward and seem to rise,” he announces in the first lines of “Plane,” the first poem in The Carrier of Ladders: “I imagine the deities come and go / without departures.” Figure by figure, Merwin’s task is concurrently to displace the old mythologies, dispatching them as departures, and to propose ingredients of a new mythos. Read these poems as identifications of the population—the aspects, the very atomic structure—of this new narrative. “Here is the air,” he writes: “Nothing but me is moving / on these bridges / as I always knew it would be.” (“The Bridges”). He maps the ghost world behind, within, beyond the known in “Beginning of the Plains”: “wind without flags / marching into the city / to the rear.” He seeks his bearings as he narrates his explorations:

All through the dark the wind looks
for the grief it belongs to
                        (“Night Wind”)

—and nominates what he finds on his journey:

I recognize the first hunger
as the plains start
under my feet
                        (“Beginning of the Plains”)

Primacy, originality, a hunger for firstness is an essential paradox in Merwin’s art; for it is an originality of after-effect, belated in history and intentional in its quest to replace that very history and its failed narratives. Did Merwin and the other deep-imagists invent deconstruction?

Now it is clear to me that no leaves are mine
no roots are mine…

and that the birds vanish because of something
that I remember…

and some of us will burn with the speed
of endless departures
and be found and lost no more
                        (“Now It Is Clear”)

This new myth is a myth of negation, the via negativa both of mysticism and political resistance: “Maybe he does not even have to exist / to exist in departures / then the first darkness falls.” (“The First Darkness”).

Roethke agrees: “In a dark time the eye begins to see.” So Merwin, after “the first darkness falls,” sets out to repopulate like a shadow Adam the new world, even though “the eyes are not yet made that can see it.” It’s a moment of profound creation and origination: “the first composer / could hear only what we could write.” (“Memory of Spring”). A moment of re-vision and endless definition:

As on each journey there is
a silence that goes with it
                        (“On Each Journey”)

and its procedures are constructed as much by what is not as by what is:

something I’ve not done
is following me
I haven’t done it again and again
                        (“Something I’ve Not Done”)

                        *

if it’s invented it will be used
maybe not for some time
                        (“Tool”)

                        *

This is a place where a door might be
here where I am standing
in the light outside all the walls…
                        (“A Door”)

This is a vision made of such provisionals; a visionary culture made of absence and erasure, among shadows of the lost whose footsteps are semiotic traces pointing at once forward and backward into a void. It’s a method made of mysticism as well as archetypes of the deep psyche. That is to say, if Merwin’s achievement during this great period is the invention and imposition of a new mythology, it must be, in Anthony Libby’s delicious phrase, a “mythology of nothing.”

In the mid-’70s, Merwin moved to an acreage on Maui, where he still lives. My final point proposes a final paradox: is it possible to see all of Merwin’s work, the accumulated poetics of erasure and absence, as an act of preservation? After Opening the Palm (1983) and The Rain in the Trees (1988) his poetry takes on the specific task of natural custody and environmentalism, as his life’s work as gardener and cultivator deepens. Now the Merwin Conservancy is the product of his work to preserve the endangered palms. Now he explores Hawaiian epics, lost populations of trees, carrier pigeons, the endangered species from insects (“we kill you again and again”) to humans, who are still alive even as we “[depart] from ourselves.” (“Elders”). In The Vixen (1996), the fox serves as figure for the belated and departed, the elegized environment:

Comet of stillness princess of what is over
high held note without trembling without voice without sound
aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets
of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences
never caught in words

            …

let me catch sight of you again going over the wall
and before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures
guttering on a screen let my words find their own
places in the silence after the animals
                        (“Vixen”)

In fact, if we look at his recent work, but also back to all his work, it’s possible to retranslate the theoretical, abstractive tropes of absence and loss into specific narratives of environmental disaster and extinction. What would an early poem look like, read anew, through the lens of eco-poetics? Here’s a bit of Merwin’s early blank-verse poem, “Sea Monster,” from The Drunk in the Furnace, wholly allegory, refocused in the light of environmental apocalypse:

                                    [It] looked at us

For a long time, as though it knew us, but

Did not harm us… sinking at last,

The waters closing like a rush of breath. Then

We were all ashamed at what we had seen…

                        since then we have forgotten

How it was that, on sea or land, once

We proved to ourselves that we were awake.

What is the definition of prophecy? The subject we didn’t know was there was there all along, waiting to emerge when we are ready to see it—even though, he says, we may be ashamed at what we find. Prophecy is foresight, seeing into the future; it is pre-diction, a saying-ahead-of. Perhaps not even Merwin has known the full range and possible subjects of his deepest gestures. In fact, I think his work has moved in reverse order of traditional myth-making, in a final via negativa: evolving from the largest, most impersonal of myth-making—his first four books—toward an erasure of that myth and installation of a replacement myth, its negative, a mythos of nothingness; and, now, into the surprising focused, particular narrative of natural peril and extinction. Prophecy: only in after-sight can we tell its foresight. Here are lines from “The Sapphire,” rhymed couplets from Green with Beasts, from exactly sixty years ago:

                                    I stood on nothing in darkness,
Neither finding nor falling, without hope nor dread,
Not knowing pleasure nor discontented.
In time, like the first beam arriving from
The first star, a ray from a seed of light came.…
I recognized its visionary presence
By its clarity, its changeless patience,
And the unuttered joy that it was,
As the world’s love before the world was.

 

On W.S. Merwin’s The Lice

by Meghan O’Rourke

A lyric poem makes time into a physical thing: It parses our passing line by line. The best American poems do so, I would argue, by disrupting the linear rather than by reinforcing it: They complicate our transactional grasp of interval, replace our inner Google calendar with a daybook annotated by appointments with memory, inexplicable word-pictures, a future lit only by a dead star’s light. They show us how the sun rose, “a ribbon at a time” (Dickinson) and imagine what it might be like to be found “underfoot” after we are gone (Whitman). A great lyric poem is a trapdoor to spiritual and ontological depths. It refracts our experience of time, making itself a totem and talisman, a “dumb old medallion” (Archibald MacLeish) that speaks to us, urgently.

W.S. Merwin’s The Lice (1967), his sixth volume of poems, and to this day perhaps his most influential, is a book of crisis—ecological and political crisis, of a sort that feels all too familiar. A slim volume of dark, bleak lyrics that invoke various apocalypses—a denuded planet, the fruitless ravages of the Vietnam war, species extinction, a future of companionless isolation in which the dead are always proximate to us—The Lice signals that in addition to being a poet of myth and meditation, Merwin would turn out to be one of our great American political poets. This might sound strange, because, with the exception of the famous poem “The Asians Are Dying,” The Lice is almost entirely bereft of the historical and cultural references that we associate with political poetry.

In what way, you might ask, are the elusive poems in W.S. Merwin’s The Lice political poems? And how does the “open form” he famously came to in this book speak to his developing political and ecological sensibility? In The Lice, Merwin tries to answer an unanswerable question, one that still matters to us today: How does a poet voice ecological devastation—how does a speaker envision an ecology beyond the human—without reinforcing a kind of ethnocentric vision, or being inherently of the anthropocene era? How do you condemn war in a poem that is also open, flexible, and demands rereading? The answer Merwin finds in The Lice is to conjure a quasi-posthumous speaker who can’t quite anchor him/herself in history or time, a predicament he embodies in a new use of line that is as disorienting as his former use of line was orienting or organizing. In “The Child,” the speaker tells us,

I pass skins withering in gardens that I see now
Are not familiar
And I have lost even the thread I thought I had.

Too often we associate political poetry with didacticism and an absence of art—think of Yeats’s “out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry”—and Merwin himself wrote of the danger of a political poem becoming a mere “loudspeaker.” What I want to argue here is that rather than its politics being some kind of impediment to the aesthetic discoveries of The Lice, they were essential to it: its intricate art is fueled by what the Paris Review called a “savage ecological and political rage,” and without the pressure of that rage, Merwin might never have found his new prosody. The Lice’s aesthetic exploration is forged in the crucible of feeling voiceless.

The weight of Merwin’s increasing anger about politics and ecology—in the 1960s he took part in the nuclear disarmament movement, and began exploring environmentalism—created a new kind of formal pressure in the poems, generatively leading him to move beyond received myth toward making cosmologies from new, unused materials. He began writing these poems after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, when Americans were beginning to grapple with environmental issues and as the shadow of nuclear war still hung over them; during this period he moved back to America from England and then on to France, and while in France began trying to live off a kitchen garden. Uncoincidentally, the planet on view in The Lice is ruined, a place of “remembered metropoli” populated by the not-quite-dead, where people are alone except for nameless animals, in a land where they have “no voice” and death is evoked in terms of stellar and cosmic, not just mortal, extinction. Take “The Anniversary of My Death”:

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam from a lightless star

The apocalyptic strain and loosening of form was already there in Merwin’s previous book, The Moving Target. But it is in The Lice that Merwin completes the break with his former style—discarding the highly wrought/organized, polished, Audenesque poems of the 1940s and 1950s. These poems eschew punctuation, so that the lines seem to hang in uncertain, vibrating relation to one another, without directing us how to read them. As he put it, “Punctuation nails the poem down on the page. When you don’t use it the poem becomes more a thing in itself, at once more transparent and more actual.” The poems in The Lice are nearly all voiced by a first person speaker and yet at times they seem almost not human. Helen Vendler has called this new poem a “punctuationless short poem lacking (after its first line) initial capitals, a poem spoken to nobody within hearing distance, spoken to the air.”

Crucially, this shift in Merwin’s line changes the poems’ relationship to time: no longer is it tidy, and ordered; now it is cosmic, enacted, alienating. As Merwin wrote in his seminal essay “On Open Form,” published a year after the appearance of The Lice,

What is called its form may be simply that part of the poem that had directly to do with time; the time of the poem, the time in which it was written, and the sense of recurrence in which the unique moment of vision is set.…

In an age when time and technique encroach hourly… on the source itself of poetry, it seems as though what is needed for any … poem is not a manipulable, more or less predictably recurring pattern, but an unduplicatable resonance, something that would be like an echo except that it is repeating no sound.

The absence of punctuation in The Lice allows the lines to resonate as he uses enjambment to disorient. The line break signals unpredictability and a failure of continuity (as well as a desperate need for it). It enacts the disruption of meaning, the speaker’s sense that meaning is not a granary in which we store ourselves and transmit knowledge, but something encountered when we experience the destabilization of knowledge. “This is a world without syntax, inhabited by a man who thought he had read the signs correctly,” Denis Donoghue noted in a 1967 review for The New York Review of Books, “and now, revising his texts, concludes that he was wrong.” In “The Child,” which I quoted from above, Merwin writes,

I try to remember my faults to make sure
One after the other but it is never
Satisfactory the list is never complete

and continues,

Then there are the stories and after a while I think something
Else must connect them besides just this me
I regard myself starting the search turning
Corners in remembered metropoli

The world is broken, and the speaker has “lost the thread”: “I do not believe in knowledge as we know it.”

The opening poem, “The Animals,” written mostly in couplets with two singleton lines, begins by evoking a speaker who has spent “All these years behind windows / With blind crosses sweeping the tables / And myself tracking over empty ground / Animals I never saw.” At first we read the line “myself tracking over empty ground” almost as a kind of self-referential statement, a description of searching for the self. But no: the search here is for animals, albeit ones that remain unseen, unrealized. The poem continues: “I with no voice / Remembering names to invent for them.” This speaker has been deprived of voice, perhaps because he is socially powerless, an individual among the many, or rendered mute by the wrongs he sees around him, or, indeed, posthumous, wishfully hoping for change.

Merwin’s use of negation—the “not” and “never”—is also crucial to this new “open form” (an effect he may have learned from Wallace Stevens, one of his influences). Why negation? For one thing, negation humbly—yet powerfully—evokes the real: when you see the jacket of the newly dead hanging in a closet, you realize his absence viscerally. It also allows for a dialectic: as I say “his shoes are gone” I conjure his shoes even as I acknowledge their absence. In Christian theology, one of the ways one can come to know God is by the via negativa, or apophetic theology, in which one defines God by what God is not. Here, Merwin reminds us of our temporariness, of the “real real,” by defining perception around what we may not know, making this duality—I apprehend, I begin to understand, I fail to understand—a dynamic one on the level of syntax.

You can hear this technique in “The Widow,” a poem that successfully articulates the book’s vision of desolation. “There is no season that requires us,” Merwin begins:

You confide
In images in things that can be
Represented which is their dimension you
Require them you say This
Is real and you do not fall down and moan

Not seeing the irony in the air

Everything that does not need you is real

Here, Merwin powerfully condemns the human belief that we understand the world, all while failing to see what has escaped us. (It’s worth noting that the book’s title comes from a passage in Heraclitus, used as an epigraph to the book, which invokes lice as something we carry with us without ever realizing it.)

Because of the way the lines hang here without the signposts of punctuation, time gets confused, doubles back and forward on itself, becomes a tesseract. The last poem in the book, “Looking for Mushrooms at Sunrise,” seems explicitly to invoke Whitman’s famous poem of unification, “Song of Myself,” playing on and with Whitman’s projection into a future he himself can’t witness. He begins by describing the speaker “walking on centuries of dead chestnut leaves / In a place without grief” in the time between night and dawn, when an oriole “Out of another life warns me / That I am awake.” In the night, “The gold chanterelles pushed through a sleep that was not mine” and so when he came to find them, he realizes:

Where they appear it seems I have been before
I recognize their haunts as though remembering
Another life

Where else am I walking even now
Looking for me

The speaker here, as in many of the poems, is cosmically suspended, aware of deep past and deep future. In this way, the speakers often verge on a kind of posthumousness—each is fully human but has lost himself in a way that is crucial to his credibility as a moral guide. It is as if the poems seek to translate themselves into the utterances of something transhuman. Merwin wrote one of the most moving brief elegies in the English language, titled, simply, “Elegy”: “Who would I show it to.”

Now, for political poems these may seem curiously disconnected from historical reference points—more mystical than political. And yet they challenge our bedrock ideas of identity, pushing into almost transhistorical depths. In this way The Lice is a precursor for much that would come, a model for a moment when many poets likewise feel a civic discontent and that they speak “with no voice.” It shows us, too, that we should have a more capacious idea of what political poetry really is. These poems are essentially meditative, probing traumas as one might probe a tooth coming loose, but they are indubitably eco-political, dramatizing human culpability. In The Lice, dogged by a sense of the world falling apart around him, Merwin found a style that not only allowed him to express his rage but to actually embody, in time, the disorientation produced by his apocalyptic sense of being at the end of something larger than ourselves. He found a voice for extinction that, paradoxically, carries past the end point of its possibility, like the light of dead star.

 

A Dazzling Darkness: William Merwin’s Night

by Rosanna Warren

A good poem takes its shape from its quest for knowledge, and its finished form on the page traces the form of its knowing. In his book The Shadow of Sirius, from 2008, William S. Merwin pursues knowledge with unusual determination and explicitness. Forms of the verb “to know” appear in almost every poem. And more often as verb than as the noun “knowledge,” since the revelations Merwin seeks emerge as awareness of processes and ventures rather than as the static, contained product the noun suggests.

A quest to know what? For more than half a century, Merwin has been revolving the age-old question of our mortal being in time. It’s the fundamental concern of poetry and song, language moving in time to commemorate our passing and our desire to remain: “Like as the waves make for the pebbled shore / So do our minutes hasten to their end...” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 60). But Merwin has brought a particular, ecological consciousness to this meditation. As early as 1967, in The Lice, long before widespread public awareness of environmental disaster, Merwin murmured, “The extinct animals are still looking for their home” (in the poem “In Autumn”), and the poem “The Last One” in that book staged a dark parable of a people destroying their land and in turn being destroyed by the shadow they have created: “Well they’d made up their minds to be everywhere because why not.” (“The Last One”).

The conventional lyric preoccupation with time passing, then, translates for Merwin into the particular grief of time running out for many species of plants and animals, and perhaps for the earth itself. The Shadow of Sirius links that grief to the awareness of time running out for the aging poet himself, an awareness that doesn’t provoke grief, but rather highlights experience and memory and paces acceptance. A real poem has real work to do. Merwin’s work in The Shadow of Sirius is to metabolize the facts of loss and extinction—personal and general—into patterned psychic experience, beyond grief and panic, into a state, not passive, but wisely alert, with room for mourning and celebration in equal measure. The poems of this highly unified book achieve such transformation through style. With a rarefied diction (the words “silence,” “darkness,” and “hush” sound the bass-note throughout); with a fluid free verse steeped in remembered iambic cadences; with liturgical repetition; with the occasional lofting to the majesty of an ode (“o breath of morning,” “The Nomad Flute”), the Sirius poems usher the reader into a mysterious knowing beyond rational knowledge, and into an intuition about a language beyond words: “in its archaic / untaught language / that brings the bees to the rosemary” (“Heartland”).

In its stylization and its celebration of song and the natural world, The Shadow of Sirius renews the genre of pastoral, darkened by elegy as it is in Theocritus and Virgil, in poems at once archaic and painfully contemporary. I would like to track their transformative work in two poems, “A Codex” and this poem, “The Nomad Flute”:

You that sang to me once sing to me now
let me hear your long lifted note
survive with me
the star is fading
I can think farther than that but I forget
do you hear me

do you still hear me
does your air
remember you
o breath of morning
night song morning song
I have with me
all that I do not know
I have lost none of it

but I know better now
than to ask you
where you learned that music
where any of it came from
once there were lions in China

I will listen until the flute stops
and the light is old again

The poem immediately establishes intimacy between the speaker, “I,” and the “you” who seems to be the flute remembered from long ago. In its simplicity and repetitiveness, all monosyllables, the first line sets the key for the book, and coordinates past and present: sang/sing; once/now. And though the poem is in free verse, this line has five stresses and ten syllables: it remembers the canonical English pentameter even while straying from it, in a book that is all about the sacramental efficacy of memory. It’s worth asking why Merwin has divided the poem into irregular stanzas: other poems in the book are undivided, and still others are in subtly rhymed or unrhymed couplets. Here, the divisions mark stages in awareness. The first stanza issues commands: sing to me, let me hear, survive. The urgency of these imperatives rises from the threat of time passing and darkness encroaching: “the star is fading,” and gives way to an equally urgent question: “do you hear me.”

The second stanza repeats the question, increasing the anxiety with a temporal adverb: “do you still hear me.” By now, in a magical reciprocity, the relationship of speaker to hearer has reversed: it’s no longer a question of “I” hearing the flute, but of the flute hearing “me,” and thereby granting “me” a larger measure of reality. The flute introduces a book that will be permeated by animism, a world in which light, tombstones, a glass, stones, and animals all share consciousness. Stanza two also introduces the theme of knowledge: “I have with me / all that I do not know / I have lost none of it.” Which presents one of the book’s fundamental strategies: paradox. In order to press beyond categories of rational knowledge, these poems all find ways of thrusting the reader into logical impasses from which one could emerge only in an intuitive, perhaps mystical leap. Here, we have the contradiction of an assertion of selfhood and possession (“I have with me”) and a confession of ignorance, lack of possession (“all that I do not know”). The further claim, “I have lost none of it,” is also self-contradictory, because what has not been lost is itself a condition of loss.

Stanza three carries us across the logical blockade with a new statement about knowledge in time: “but I know better now.” This triumphal claim is immediately qualified, and elaborates a new understanding of knowledge as a kind of tact or wise ignorance: “but I know better now / than to ask you / where you learned that music.” The one line that seems incongruous, because it makes a statement about positive rather than negative knowledge, is itself a statement of loss: “once there were lions in China.” The final couplet in the future tense is the fruit of that new awareness: “I will listen until the flute stops / and the light is old again.” A coordination of past and present and a stilling of appetite for information engender a future, though a precarious one—“until the flute stops.” It is in the light of this vow, this listening, that the rest of the book will unfold. In yet another form of tact, the poet—usually the one speaking—here appears as a listener. And his delicately prefigured death appears not as a silencing of his voice, but as the silencing of the larger music he has been hearing.

“A Codex,” by contrast, advances in couplets. It further differs from “The Nomad Flute” in pouring forward in one sentence and in enjambing emphatically. Merwin long ago abandoned punctuation, but his poems work themselves out in a wide variety of lineation and syntax, and “A Codex” staggers its quest for knowledge, its progress toward its last word “known,” in a struggle between the arresting terraces of the couplets and the ongoing force of the sentence:

It was a late book given up for lost
again and again with its sentences

bare at last and phrases that seemed transparent
revealing what had been there the whole way

the poems of daylight after the day
lying open at last on the table

without explanation or emphasis
like sounds left when the syllables have gone

clarifying the whole grammar of waiting
not removing one question from the air

or closing the story although single lights
were beginning by then above and below

while the long twilight deepened its silence
from sapphire through opal to Athena’s iris

until the shadow covered the gray pages
the comet words the book of presences

after which there was little to say
but then it was night and everything was known

Throughout The Shadow of Sirius, Merwin adjusts relations between time, knowledge, and language, and many of the poems point toward a language beyond words, an “archaic / untaught language / that brings the bees to the rosemary.” “A Codex” is explicitly preoccupied by the problem of language conveying ineffable knowledge. And because human understanding and language occur in time, the poem structures its quest in a sequence of clauses marked by temporal adverbs: “while the long twilight,” “until shadow,” “after which,” “but then.”

The poem is a parable. The word “codex” means an ancient, bound manuscript, the early form of the book, and can refer specifically to a sacred text, such as Scripture, or to a body of laws and regulations. Merwin’s poem moves teasingly between gestures of revelation (“sentences / bare at last,” “phrase that seemed transparent / revealing,” “lying open at last on the table”), and gestures of occlusion (“a book given up for lost,” “like sounds left when the syllables have gone”). This sacred book will not inform us in any conventional way. It will not remove “one question from the air” or close the story. What good is it, then? If we follow the poem’s lead, we will “know better”—as in “The Nomad Flute”—than to ask such a question. We will submit to the pacing of the couplets as they restore a lost book but drain light from the pages, through twilight to shadow to night. We will entertain the possibility of a language persisting beyond semantics and even beyond phonetics. We will give up our demand for “presences” and for “comet words”—those brilliant, authoritative phrases. If the poem works, it works as a formal meditation to induct the reader into a state of quiet receptivity, an intimacy with emptiness and darkness in which ego dissolves and in which death may be imagined without panic. It resembles the conclusion of another poem in the book, “Far Along in the Story,” where a boy listens to a flock of cranes until “the cranes were gone from the sky and at / that moment he remembered who he was / only he had forgotten his name.”

Poems take their shapes from their quest for knowledge, I proposed. “A Codex” leads us on stepped couplets toward the paradox of an “everything” being known when it’s night and nothing is known. Or when inadequate knowledge has fallen away. In “The Nomad Flute,” “know” half-rhymes with “now,” and opens into a knowledge maturing from the present into an imagined future. In the last line of “A Codex,” “night” and “known” don’t rhyme, but they alliterate. They precipitate a paradoxical counter-knowledge, “but then it was night and everything was known”: a mystic chiaroscuro that echoes the paradox of the book’s title, The Shadow of Sirius. Sirius, the Dog Star, is the brightest star in our sky. What would be its shadow? It turns out that Sirius has a mysterious, smaller, partner-star, its shadow one might say, invisible for millennia, detected only in 1862. “A Codex” discovers this “deep but dazzling darkness” (to use Henry Vaughan’s expression, in his poem “The Night”). In that darkness, we are invited to contemplate loss and extinction, not with hysteria and not with complacency, but with stoic clarity, and a kind of calm if not with peace.

 

The Nomad Flute

by Stanley Plumly

You that sang to me once sing to me now

When I think of W.S. Merwin’s immense body of work—some twenty-five volumes of lyric and extended poetry, plus many, many books of meditative prose, plus innumerable major translations of classic texts from major languages—when I think of Merwin’s total body of writing, I am struck by how consistent the voice is in these different genres, especially the poetry, which is the source of where that voice is calling from. Anyone who has heard Merwin read his poetry aloud can hear that quiet richly authoritative quality of voice: I mean the listener can hear the Merwin music as Merwin himself seems to have heard it, written it down, then spoken it.

Such a quality of voice is, of course, not easy to define, since it lives inside its tone and timbre and visual textures, and even more difficult since it lives inside its implied content—the how of the voice inevitably tied to the what of the voice. One thing that is true of all good, not to say great, writing is that its voice tends to be manifest: you can see it as well as hear it; it has an imaginative correspondence in much the same way that what we hear in music becomes visible in the mind’s eye. Eliot, that great critical phrase-maker, tries to define the fact of this quality of voice as the “auditory imagination”: that is, “the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thoughts and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end.”

If this is rather abstract and roundabout as a definition, perhaps it needs to be, since we are talking about the audible as ineffable. Eliot goes on to say that the auditory imagination “works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.”

I find Eliot’s use of the concept “mentality” to be cold, when what we are recognizing is the warmest part of a poem—its voice, and the quality that makes that voice effective. I think Eliot’s “mental” intention is to connect the grounded mind to the grounded heart in the celestial structures of the imagination, and to see in the dialectic between the old and the new, the familiar and the discovered the metaphor-making capacity of poetry, so that hearing a good poem in its right voice—either silently or literally—is to understand the word made flesh. What I find most compelling in the language of Eliot’s formulation is his doting on words like “primitive” and “ancient,” qualities almost Jungian in their suggestion of “returning to the origin and bringing something back… from far below the conscious levels of thoughts and feeling.” Merwin, more than any of our poets, speaks from that archetypal zone we associate with the primary, ancient, even classical imagination. It is as if he makes audible a dream language a priori to whatever the specific, particular, singular experience is.

One of the basic symbolist terms of Merwin’s dream language is “song,” or singing, or, as he writes at the end of his existential poem “Air,” “This must be what I wanted to be doing, / Walking at night between the two deserts, / Singing.” Singing, in fact, is one of Merwin’s answers as to how his voice functions—indeed, the word “song” comes up repeatedly throughout his work. But song, for this poet, does not so much assume a musical equivalency as it evokes a vocal arrangement of tone or emotion spoken out of hard-won wisdom—old, totemic, ancestral wisdom. One way to say it is that the ghost presence behind Merwin’s best poems comes from the collective unconscious, for which he is an individual spokesperson, whose personal identity authenticates our shared heart-felt and cultural narratives. Yet meta-song for Merwin is more than means and method, it is the substance, the lyric expression of language at a perfect level with meaning, in which his calm, reconciling voice draws horizon lines across the space and volume of the experience.

Much has been made, and should be made, of Merwin’s evolution as a formalist-cum-“free verse” poet. Compare his form-exploring career of subtle yet profound development within the traditional limits of what the lyric poem can be, and you still find the personality of the Merwin voice to be a unified, consistent instrument—yes, a voice of natural variation but also, always, a lyrically civil understated voice that stays within itself, within its range, while, across time, it calls from the aural distances of our animistic past.

We know from our decades of reading him that Merwin is essentially a sunset poet. He is also a poet, like Wordsworth, alone on the landscape, in a setting at once mythic yet self-contained. More than his identity, however, more than the transformation of form from linear convention to a kind of flow-syntax in which the tensions are controlled by internal enjambments, and more than the deep silences within his language, is Merwin’s brilliant rescue back to loneliness, spiritual isolation, natural connection, and the feeling in his poems of a romance with the old gods. It would seem no accident that fresh out of Princeton, Merwin would seek out the great English writer Robert Graves on the Isle of Mallorca, and end up editing a good portion of Graves’s classic White Goddess, the best book ever written on poetic myth, particularly on the archetype of the moon, in all its phases. Merwin’s subsequent travels throughout the ancient Mediterranean and Provencal worlds stand at the beginning of his wandering, his nomadic search, his Continental education, and his commitment to an “international” style.

A style that comes over as a secret to be shared, in a voice that needs to bring the reader to the center of the intimacy of the circumstances. It is hard not to move your lips when reading a Merwin poem, as it moves almost sotto voce within the voicelessness of the page, his dream to your dream, yet separated at the aesthetic distance of form. Merwin’s poems are symbol-figures, masks that conceal in order to reveal. It matters supremely, therefore, how they represent what they say, from the mouth of the darkness of the cave looking directly out into the light. Merwin is nearly ninety now, so he has developed a good deal of dream wisdom backed up behind him. The remarkable thing is that from the start, from 1952 and The Mask of Janus, the Merwin voice has sounded well beyond its years, in a tone at once vulnerable yet majestical, haunted yet utterly confident, of the moment yet remote.

The aural imagination is—if the idea of metaphor means anything anymore—a metaphor for enhancing how we see what we hear, the experience of which depends absolutely on the linguistic synesthesia only the imagination can provide. It can happen in a word or be created by the brickwork and total structure of a poem, in the syntax and rhythm, yes, but in the silences too, in the aural, the silently spoken give and take. But I like, especially, the idea of it happening within the weight of a single word, the way Eliot’s metaphoric patient is “etherized upon a table”—the brilliant sound of the verb “etherized” echoing its sense of paralysis.

In The Lice, one of Merwin’s best books, published in 1967, there is a love poem that he left out of his Selected, doubtless for all kinds of personal reasons, one of which is that it was originally dedicated to his second wife Dido. The poem has been restored in the Library of America edition of his work. I think “When You Go Away” is one of his most beautiful poems, and beautiful in the way it builds, through apparent discontinuity, its imagination, and beautiful in the way it sustains its apparent unity through tone.

The poem moves like a sonnet, whose lyric turn starts with the recognition line “I remember that I am falling” and continues with the realization “That I am the reason” for why you go away, and concludes with the self-reflection on the poem itself “that my words are the garment of what I shall never be / Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.” The “And” at the beginning of this ending “couplet” is rhetorically necessary because it picks up a certain soft drum-roll in the overall rhythm and pacing of the poem. The thought-rhyme of “be/boy” is crucial as well, as it speaks to the fifteen-year age difference between the younger Merwin and Dido. If I had to choose a one-word example of a powerful auditory image, the word “tucked” would be it. It seems to me to do all that is required of it onomatopoetic moment. The sleeve is tucked, not pinned nor tied nor rolled up tight. It is tucked, temporary, as if promising something that can never happen. And it is a boy’s arm, not a man’s, against the natural order of things. The tucked image magnifies what is lost when you go away, while the garment, like a remnant, of the sleeve will never, in the longest line of the poem, be unfurled.

In a poem from only a few years ago, Merwin writes that “I have with me / all that I do not know / I have lost none of it.” Whatever, ontologically, he still does not know, Merwin knows the feeling of what that feels like. Merwin, above all our poets, is the poet of Longing, of the human condition Eliot once described as being able to imagine a fulfillment we can never have. The music of Merwin’s imagination is the heard equivalent of the correlatives he creates to represent this truth. You read a Merwin poem here and there in a magazine, you read through the latest collection of those poems as gathered in a particular year, you read two or three books of his poetry in sequence, then you think about the sweep of the poetry, the twenty and more major volumes, plus the year after year publication of prose and translations, and you come away aware that Merwin’s life work is a monument not just to talent but to courage, you come away knowing that this is what a whole life is.

 

David Baker’s latest books are Scavenger Loop (poems, 2015) and Show Me Your Environment (essays, 2014). Poetry Editor of Kenyon Review, he teaches at Denison University.

Meghan O’Rourke is the author of the poetry collections Halflife, Once, and Sun in Days (forthcoming in 2017), as well as The Long Goodbye, a nonfiction account of grief in the United States today. A Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches at NYU and Princeton.

Rosanna Warren teaches in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book of poems is Ghost in a Red Hat.

Stanley Plumly’s new collection of poems is Against Sunset (2016). Among his critical work are two books on British Romanticism, Posthumous Keats (2008) and The Immortal Evening (2014). He teaches at the University of Maryland.