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 the poet Galway Kinnell as a classmate and he was mentored by the poet John
Berryman and the poet and critic R. P. Blackmur (Summer Doorways, 43-46). Merwin
dedicated the 1963 collection A Moving Target to Blackmur. He wrote a memorable poem about
the coaching and criticism 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 own 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 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):
Vendler, Helen.
“Desolation Shading Into Terror.”
New York Times (1970):
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