An Appreciation of W. S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin “All Metaphor is magic”             W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927.  His father was a Protestant minister and Merwin writes of his father that: “until I turned on him physically and defied him, I had been afraid of mine. During my early childhood he had been distant, unpredictable, and harsh.  He had punished me fiercely for things I had not known were forbidden, when the list of known restrictions was already long and oppressive.  I was told regularly that I loved him, as I was told that I loved God and Jesus, and I did not know at the time that the names for much of my feeling about him were really dread and anger” (Summer Doorways, 12).  Merwin attended grade school in Union City, New Jersey and “had been moved a grade ahead, skipping a year, and then another one, and then been told that would not work because I was too much younger than any of my classmates,  which would be bad for me, and I had been moved back again one grade.  I came to feel that somehow all that shifting was my fault.  After it was settled there was always an age difference of a year or two between my classmates and me” (Summer Doorways, 17).  Later, in a poem titled, Lament for the Makers, Merwin revisited the time of his schooldays (Migration, 412): I that all through my early days I remember well was always          the youngest of the company          save for one sister after me He goes on to reflect on the many poets he has known that have died: Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Edwin Muir, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams,  Robert Frost, Ted Roethke, Louis McNeice, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarell, John Berryman, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, David Jones, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Howard Moss, Robert Graves, Howard Nemerov, William Stafford, James Merrill.  This is an impressive list.  Of Elizabeth Bishop he wrote:             then that watchful and most lonely          wanderer whose words went with me everywhere Elizabeth Bishop lay alone in death          they were leaving the party early          our elders it came home to me but the needle moved among us taking always by surprise          flicking by too fast to see          to touch a friend born after me Of course, not all the poets in the list above were younger than Merwin, some were his “elders,” but it is clear from this poem and a later poem To My Teeth, that I will discuss in more detail, that Merwin enjoys a sense of community with other poets. A precocious student, Merwin enrolled at Princeton University in 1944 at the age of sixteen.  As an undergraduate, he had poets Galway Kinnell as classmate and John Berryman and R. P. Blackmur as mentors and critics (Summer Doorways, 43-46).              Merwin dedicated the 1963 collection A Moving Target to Blackmur.   He wrote a memorable poem about the coaching that John Berryman gave him (Migration, 255).   Berryman’s suggestion that Merwin should get down on his knees and pray to the Muse seems instructive advice for a young poet. It was at Princeton that Merwin met his first wife Dorothy Ferry whom he married, “a rash, unconsidered arrangement, not destined to last, and indeed already coming undone,” and he took her off with him to Europe in 1948 (Summer Doorways, 3).  Merwin made his living by tutoring the children of wealthy families including the son of the poet Robert Graves, in Majorca, while married to Dorothy, residing in Europe, and writing verse plays in his spare time.  A summary of Merwin’s life can be found on the web (Poets.org).  From the Poets.org brief biography we learn that Merwin met Dido Milroy in 1950 whom he married after ending his first marriage to Dorothy; and, that she was a major influence on Merwin, encouraging him to fulfill his vocation as a poet.  An article by Dinitia Smith in the New York Times provides an excellent account of this period in Merwin’s life (Smith).  Dido was fifteen years older than Merwin and according to Dinitia Smith “dominated most of his adult life.”  In 1968, Merwin separated from Dido, who refused to give him a divorce until 1982.  He has since lived mostly in the U.S. principally in Hawaii on the island of Maui (Smith).             Merwin’s first book of Poem, A Mask for Janus, was published in 1952 and won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize, judged then by W. H. Auden (A Poet of Their Own).  It is interesting that Merwin chose to include just one of these poems in Migration, the collection of new and selected poems published in 2005 (Migration).  A Mask for Janus was dedicated to his first wife, Dorothy; but, the poem included in Migration is one dedicated to Dido, Dictum: For a Masque of Deluge.  A dictum is a formal saying or a pronouncement, and this poem is formal, and pronounces Merwin’s seriousness as a poet.  He contemplates the Biblical story of the deluge.  In this poem’s last two stanzas he imagines the surviving man: Whose shocked speech must conjure a landscape As of some country where the dead years keep A circle of silence, a drying vista of ruin, Musters himself, rises, and stumbling after The dwindling beasts, under the all-colored Paper rainbow, whose arc he sees as promise, Moves in an amazement of resurrection, Solitary, impoverished, renewed. 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 before that revel To teach an order and rehearse the days Till the days are accomplished: so now the dove Makes assignations with the olive tree, Slurs with her voice the gestures of the time: The day foundering, the dropping sun Heavy, the wind a low portent of rain. This poem was written in the aftermath of the Second World War and Hiroshima and Nagasaki when a first generation of artists and poets was confronted with the knowledge that Mankind now had the wherewithal (the H-bomb) to utterly destroy the human race.  The poem also seems to record a crisis that has come and gone in Merwin’s life; he has been “resurrected” by Dido and will flourish as a serious poet from then on.             Merwin was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian faith which he abandoned while at Princeton, prompted by reading Spinoza (Summer Doorways, 42).  Eventually he became a Buddhist but there is Buddhist imagery in his early poetry.  For example, in Dancing Bears, his second book of poems, in the poem On the Subject of Poetry there is: I do not understand the world, Father By the millpond at the end of the garden There is a man who slouches listening To the wheel revolving in the stream, only There is no wheel there to revolve and I speak of him, Father, because he is There with his hands in his pockets, in the end Of the garden listening to the turning Wheel that is not there, but it is the world, Father, that I do not understand             Once established as a poet, Merwin has never worked except at his craft and he has never taken a university position which is how most American poets make a living.  In order to live inexpensively, Merwin spent much time abroad, much of it in rural France where he could live very cheaply and later in Mexico.  It is clear that his relationship with Dido was crucial in enabling him to establish this mode of life.  But this marriage was not without strain and there is a poem Plea for a Captive written about 1958 that seems to equate Merwin with “a caught fox” (Migration, 59).  It seems that Merwin, a serial monogamist, has been lucky with women in the sense that he has always had a female companion with him, if not a wife. Merwin’s early work is all written in the formal structured manner with punctuation characterized in the quotations above.  In his Preface to The Second Four Books of Poems, Merwin describes how, by the time of his sixth collection of poems he had completely abandoned punctuation and normal structural conventions in his poetry (The Second Four Books, 1).  The Vixen, published in 1996, includes a poem, Emergence, which meditates on his former life in France with Dido and subsequent life in the U.S. and Hawaii (Migration, 382). This poem shows Merwin dipping into the meditative cadence stream of thought that inspires much of his work.  A key passage is: …and I have come not to live there once more nor to stay nor to touch           nor to understand arriving from farther and farther from the time of alien cities from the breathing          of traffic from sleepless continents from the eye of water from flying at altitudes at which nothing          can survive and from the darkness and from afterward Merwin won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1970 collection of poems, The Carrier of Ladders.  Helen Vendler, the well known poetry critic said in a review of this book that Merwin is “a lesser Eliot;” and, she said: “I don’t know for sure whether one has the right to reproach a poet for his subject, but Merwin has been maintaining his starved and mute stance so long that one has a relentless social-worker urge to ask him to eat something, anything, to cure his anemia” (Vendler).  This comment seems apt in some ways because after his early more formal work, Merwin’s subject matter became increasingly personal and subjective, perhaps the result of frequent meditation.  There is also an aspect of Vendler’s comment that strikes a chord, it is that of a woman wanting to take Merwin in hand and nourish him, something that seems to have been characteristic of Merwin’s relationship with women.  A poem that I think is representative of Merwin’s work is To My Teeth published in Migration as one of the new poems dated 2004.  In one of his early poems, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, from Dancing Bears, Merwin wrote: “All metaphor (she said) is magic.”  In To My Teeth, Merwin creates magic through metaphor in a short poem that compares his own teeth to the loyal band of adventurers in the Homeric epic The Odyssey.   Merwin, at that time in his eighties, is writing about those teeth that are “still with him” who sit “across from the hollows” and wander if he (Ulysses/Odysseus) will “stay there” or go to join the companions lost along the way In this short poem, Merwin conjures up a vision of Ulysses and his crew trying to get back to Ithaca after the Trojan War and encountering disasters along the way until only Ulysses himself is left.  He does this by merely using the name of Ulysses, a word charged with mythic power, and then describing what has happened to his own teeth.  I think, that when he writes about “the friends lost one by one in pain” he is giving his own journey through life an epic quality and he is referring to the many poets he named in Lament for the Makers.  He accomplishes essays of meaning in a few words.  When he writes about “the coming home one / bare day to a later / age that was their own / but with their scars now upon them” one can feel the sadness of loss, of so many friends, of people he has loved.  This poem then is “all metaphor” and although the poem can be spoken with a rhythmic cadence the language is simple and clear yet evokes “magic.”  The last line is filled with ambiguity: "but would he stay there".  Is he home at last or will he journey on?  We suspect the answer is that Merwin is acknowledging that he will not “stay there,” and that he will die.  That makes the last line very poignant. Works Cited Merwin W. S. The Second Four Books of Poems. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press,    1993. Merwin W. S. Migration: New & Selected Poems. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press,  2005. Merwin W. S. Summer Doorways, A Memoir. New York: Shoemaker Hoard, 2005 Poet.org. “W. S. Merwin.”  http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/123 Smith, Dinitia.  “A Poet of Their Own.”  New York Times (1995):  http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/04/specials/merwin-own.html Vendler, Helen.  “Desolation Shading Into Terror.”  New York Times (1970):  http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/04/specials/merwin-pale.html