Swimming by Night (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: James Merrill
- First Published: 1961
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
The Poem
“Swimming by Night” begins, not surprisingly, in the middle of things: “A light going out in the forehead/ Of the house by the ocean” signals to the reader that the poet is already in deep water. James Merrill is presumably swimming in the ocean off the coast of an island in Greece, where he spent nearly two decades living half of each year. He wrote a prose version of this poem in The (Diblos) Notebook (1965), in which Sandy, the protagonist in a novel—which Sandy is writing himself, in one of those nice double gestures that Merrill adores—explains...
[The entire page is 1454 words long]
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