in which Merrill shows the reader the picture of a solitary little boy who draws a face with his finger on a winter-frosted window. This poem, while beginning with the child, ends with the adult who has found a lover “whose words whose looks alone undo/ such frosts.” There are poems about the family, too, and in this volume Merrill plunges deeper into both family and romantic relationships.

Nights and Days

In his third book, Nights and Days, which won the National Book Award, he includes a series of seven sonnets, exploring his feelings about his parents. Although violence and anger are masked, powerful emotion is communicated when he writes that in his father’s blue gaze he can see “the soul eclipsed by twin black pupils, sex/ and business; time was money in those days.” Although the chief character of the book’s final poem is a woman (who in one scene wears makeup that turns her face into a clown’s mask), the poem’s title, “Days of 1964,” alludes to the titles used by C. P. Cavafy for poems about gay liaisons. In this volume, Merrill moves closer to expressing his true feelings.

The Fire Screen

Judith Moffett writes of Merrill’s next book, The Fire Screen, that it does not seem to advance the work. Stephen Yenser finds that in it the narrative impulse predominates, and that in use of anecdote and character “Kostas Tympakianakis” points toward Merrill’s later long narratives. In almost every collection, Merrill includes at least one poem that concerns family; in this volume, it is “Mornings in a New House,” which includes the lines that give the volume its title. He shows a cold man in a new house in front of its fireplace. He thinks about the fire screen stitched in crewel by his mother when she was a child. The screen, depicting giant birds and flowery trees, is a kind of embroidery made from lustrous threads, but threads that have been crossed, recrossed, and knotted—not unlike, perhaps, the relationships between mother and child. Love is a theme of several of these poems, but it is artfully veiled. In the volume’s first poem, “Lorelei,” the narrator speaks of an unnamed loved one, saying that each stepping-stone has stranded “you.” Next Merrill’s typical opposites appear, and he changes, saying, “Does not. Not yet. Not here./ Is it a crossing? Is there no way back?”

Braving the Elements

Merrill’s next book, Braving the Elements, is significant in several ways. First, it is replete with puns and numerous other wordplays, as his previous books were, but they are even more evident and delightful here. He uses these methods in “The Emerald,” another poem about both family and love. In this poem, his mother gives him an emerald ring that his father had given her when his son was born. It is for his future wife, she says. Although the poem says that he does not tell his mother, he is telling the reader that he is gay, that he will not marry and father children.

I do not tell her, it would sound theatrical,Indeed this green room’s mine, my very life.We are each other’s; there will be no wife;The little feet that patter here are metrical.

In the final poem in the book, the last four words, arranged in a cross pattern, illustrate Merrill’s persisting love for antithesis. The words, to be read first down and then across, are “Nought/ Sought/ Waste Erased.” They cancel one another out in one sense, but in another sense, if nothing is looked for, then the time one might have spent looking is not erased at all, but is available for other purposes. Still, it may be wasted because nothing worthwhile was tried. Merrill would have it both ways.

Although Merrill frequently used narrative elements in his poems, and in fact wrote two novels, in this volume, he presents one of his most significant narratives. “Days of 1935” combines his concern with family, his childhood loneliness, and his narrative imagination. The little rich boy who has appeared in many previous poems knows about the Lindbergh kidnapping and in his fancy constructs his own kidnappers, Floyd and Jean, who seem extremely interesting, however sinister. In the end, however, although they have snatched him out of his ordinary life and transported him into their illicit one, they let his parents take him back. He is abandoned to his mother’s “Grade/ A controls” and his father’s provisions, the latter implying that the father was more likely to give gifts than time or love. This pattern of rescue and return is one that will repeat itself in his grown-up love affairs—the excitement of the early interest and then the desertion. Merrill draws this parallel clearly in another poem in this volume, “Days of 1971,” in which he defines love:

Proust’s Law (are you listening?) is twofold:(a) What least thing our self-love longs for mostOthers instinctively withhold;(b) Only when time has slain desireIs his wish granted to a smiling ghostNeither harmed nor warmed, now, by the fire.

Divine Comedies

One of Merrill’s most significant books, Divine Comedies was published in 1976; it contains “The Book of Ephraim,” a long narrative poem that was to become part 1 of the trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover. Judith Moffett says of it, “This suspension bridge joining the body of Merrill’s earlier poetry to his Sandover trilogy may well be ultimately adjudged his finest single piece of writing.” This long poem, essentially the beginning of a journey of discovery about the nature of God, grew out of the experience Merrill and his friend and lover, David Jackson, had over a period of years with a Ouija board. The two had shared houses since 1955 in Stonington, Connecticut; Athens, Greece; and Key West, Florida.

Soon after they had moved into their Stonington house, the two were whiling away an evening at the Ouija board when something extraordinary began to happen. The cup that they were using for a pointer began to spin furiously and spelled out letter after letter, which Merrill began copying down as rapidly as possible. They were being visited by a familiar from the spirit world, one Ephraim, who explained that he was a homosexual Greek Jew who had become a servant of the Roman Emperor Tiberius. The first story line in the book has to do with the relationship between JM (Merrill) and DJ (Jackson) and their relationship to the garrulous, humorous, but not altogether reliable Ephraim. One of Ephraim’s major teachings is that God is imagination. Ephraim serves as an instructor to the two younger men about the science of the soul after death.

The second line in the plot involves characters from a novel that Merrill was writing and whose manuscript he lost in a taxi in Georgia. These characters are Eros, a person who seems to resemble Ephraim; Sergei Markovich, who may incorporate characteristics of Merrill; a Mrs. Rosamund Smith; Leon Cade, a Vietnam War veteran who has suffered some horrifying experiences in the war; and others. The third line has to do with the writing of the poem. Both JM and DJ comment on what Ephraim tells them, express doubts, and have reservations. Later, other characters appear, including Hans Lodeizen, a young Dutch poet who died of leukemia in 1950; Maya Deren, an avant-garde dancer and filmmaker who was a friend of both JM and DJ; and the poet W. H. Auden, who had recently died.

Besides opening up the exploration of the question of the nature of God, this poem continues Merrill’s interest in the nature of love. In fact, as Merrill approached middle age, he found that “we’ve wanted/ Consuming passions; these refine instead . . . Yield such regret and wit as merrily/ glow on when limbs licked blazing past recall/ Are banked where interest is minimal.” This poem is full of typical Merrill wordplays and, though focused on an otherworldly chronicle, still evidences Merrill’s concern with family. Details about JM and DJ’s everyday life and worries are included with the more esoteric and metaphysical work. The poem describes David Jackson’s aged parents living in the West, still “at each other’s gnarled,/ Loveless mercy.” It speaks as well of Merrill’s father, who

in his last illness complainedOf the effect of medication onHis real self—today Bluebeard, tomorrowBabbitt. Young chameleon, I used toAsk how on earth one got sufficientlyimbued with otherness. And now I see.

This passage again illustrates Merrill’s opposites, and his fascination with illusion and reality.

Mirabell

Mirabell, which becomes part 2 of the Sandover trilogy, is unlike “The Book of Ephraim,” in several ways. In “The Book of Ephraim,” Merrill wrote the story; in this second part, and again in part 3, the spirits dictate the material. After Ephraim’s book was finished, one day in 1976, Merrill and Jackson were engaged in what they considered would be a friendly chat with the spirits. Instead, some strange, dreadful powers intruded and ordered Merrill to write “poems of science,” because, they insisted, the work was not finished yet. After accepting their dictates, Merrill and Jackson found themselves giving hours every day to the Ouija board. Merrill spent additional hours transcribing and trying to make sense of the voluminous messages, and eventually gave them both a poetic shape and a narrative structure. What resulted is a mythology to account for the new science that has discovered black holes and other astronomical anomalies, as well as the mysteries of the cell and physical chemistry. This is an intriguing reversal of the world’s other genesis mythologies in that all of those were prescientific, whereas this mythology provides stories to explain the scientifically known. In the beginning, Merrill was uneasy because he did not have control of the material and resented that “it’s all by someone else.” Moreover, both Merrill and Jackson were uncomfortable with some of the things the spiritual messengers told them, especially their insistence on determinism and elitism. Nevertheless, Merrill eventually came to look forward to the enormous work of each day; he told Helen Vendler in an interview published in 1979, “I woke up day after day beaming with anticipation.”

The spirits provide the myths to explain God Biology, who is referred to thereafter as God B. These spirits who begin Mirabell are bats. They have numbers for names and are metaphorically the rebellious angels; they are also antimatter itself, as well as the negative electrical charge within the atom. Other characters arrive also—many of them, fortunately, more benevolent. Auden has a large role, as does JM and DJ’s old friend Maria Mitsotaki. These two act, in a certain sense, as surrogate parents for JM and DJ, Auden addressing them as “my boys” and Maria calling them “mes enfants.” These two characters have several other functions as well. Auden suggests poetic techniques to JM when the poet is struggling for an adequate form. Furthermore, he is at first the most skeptical of all the students. This works very well, because Auden had a skeptical, inquiring nature, yet his eventual adoption of the traditional Anglican faith is well known. His voice can thus lend authenticity to the bizarre proceedings. Maria, unlike Auden, was not a public figure; she was a Greek friend of JM and DJ. She serves as both a mother figure and an example of life’s strange unknowns: They discover that her death was not natural but instead a suicide. Later they also learn that her brilliant mind is really that of one of the Five Immortals.

In part 3, other friends, four angels, the Nine Muses, two numbered familiars, and other characters also appear. Mirabell is the most dense of the three parts and includes a great many explanations that have a certain tedium. The last two books continue the exploration of the nature of God but concentrate much more on humankind’s relationship with nature. The spiritual teachers are appalled at overpopulation and at massive destruction of nature’s riches. All this is lightened by Merrill’s puns, spoonerisms, and other kinds of wordplay, and by comments from JM and DJ on what they are being told.

Scripts for the Pageant

Scripts for the Pageant became part 3 of the trilogy, and in it, JM and DJ discover that the Mirabell spirits were not completely informed and hence told them some things that were wrong. It also introduces God B’s twin, Psyche/Chaos/Mother Nature. It contains further disturbing revelations. The two learned in “The Book of Ephraim” that the first law is survive and the second is no accidents; now they are instructed about “V Work,” the only work that really counts. Further, the spirit guides insist that humans sinned when they discovered how to split the atom and that a kind of apocalypse is coming. The four major characters, drawn together by their strange lessons, puzzle over the happenings. The final stanza of “Samos,” the canzone that introduces the last part of Scripts for the Pageant, addresses their mutual confusion.

Samos. We keep trying to make senseOf what we can. Not souls of the first water—Although we’ve put on airs, and taken fire—We shall be dust of quite another landBefore the seeds here planted come to light.

This passage is full of puns and wordplay, but it also illustrates the familial feeling of the four students, JM, DJ, Auden, and Maria.

In fact, when it is time for Maria to take her leave to be born again in Bombay, her last speech is of friendship and love. She says that her old life had too few attachments, and then, anticipating her new life, says, “yet if loving’s 88/ percent is chemical I anticipate/ forming some strong new bonds.” There is more than a comment on love here; there is also a punning reference to the fact that Maria is to be reborn as a biochemist. Numerous changes have also occurred in this volume, but one of the most startling has to do with Maria. In the “NO” section the readers learn that she is really Plato.

The Changing Light at Sandover

When The Changing Light at Sandover appeared, Merrill added a coda both to give a sense of closure to the entire work and to keep the process going. At the end of Scripts for the Pageant, the poem insists on swirling up, to hear God B one last time. The coda involves returns and also the possibility of new beginnings. Many of the pronouncements in Mirabell were as grim as Old Testament prophecy. Perhaps a case could be made for Scripts for the Pageant’s making subtle correspondences with the first four books of the New Testament. The coda then may correspond to the New Testament’s Book of Acts. The correspondence between the visions of Saint John in Revelation and some of the revelations in this account must not be discounted either.

The Changing Light at Sandover is Merrill’s most notable achievement. It will surely be read and studied for years, and it places him among that elite group of poets who have also dared to write their metaphysical visions: William Butler Yeats, William Blake, John Milton, and Dante. It is not surprising that a poet who was a master of poetic forms would turn his hand (or his psyche) to a system. While the systems of Blake, Milton, and Dante were concerned primarily with humanity’s relation to God, and Yeats’s work was partially concerned with this connection, Merrill’s work is more concerned with humans’ relationship to the earth on which they live. That this relationship has far-reaching and even theological implications should be no surprise.

It must be noted, however, that although the critic could study the system for its theology, the entire premise—in fact, the machinery that brings the “revelations”—is based on play. One plays with a Ouija board; it is a kind of game. This spirit of play permeates the entire work and is evident especially in the varieties of humor. Some of this is the humor of irony; some of it comes from puns, to which Merrill was addicted; some of it comes from other kinds of wordplay. The entire work merits study for its wordplay alone. One of Merrill’s most effective techniques was using a word and meaning more than one of its meanings—frequently several of them at once. This technique was used by Marianne Moore, who introduced some of her best ideas into her work this way. A study of the roots of the words Merrill carefully chose yields further clues to the depth of his humor (and his thinking as well).

Throughout Merrill’s work, family relations, the nature of love, changes, and the differences between appearance and reality occupied his attention. He began by writing poems that were relatively short but branched out into the long narrative poem, which gave him the room to let his imagination range across the whole universe and throughout history (and even prehistory) and to launch sorties into the world of ideas. There is no doubt that the writing of The Changing Light at Sandover changed and enlarged his work remarkably.

Late Settings

The year in which The Changing Light at Sandover appeared also saw the publication of From the First Nine, a selection from Merrill’s first nine books of poetry. Late Settings, published in 1985, includes some fragments that had been cut from the final The Changing Light at Sandover. “From the Cutting-Room Floor” includes bits starring William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein, who appears as hostess of Meet the Press in Heaven, interviewing Elvis Presley. The understated humor of these pieces is delightful.

The two most important poems in this volume, however, are “Clearing the Title,” which has to do with new beginnings, and “Santorini: Stopping the Leak.” The latter makes a number of references to persons and places seen in The Changing Light at Sandover. The narrator finds himself in the night kicking off his bedclothes, and the sheets flap “like bats in negative”—surely akin to the bats in Mirabell. He also passes a chapel to Saint Michael, who was one of the important characters in Scripts for the Pageant. Also, the narrator has had X rays to remove a plantar wart on his foot, but as readers know from The Changing Light at Sandover, too many X rays can burn up the soul. Now he finds that he has a small ghost-leak in the “footsole.”

The Inner Room

The Inner Room reveals a new twist in Merrill’s poetic technique. He had seldom used prose poems, but this volume contains a series of them in a section titled “Prose of Departure.” Because these poems describe a trip to Japan, they include a number of haiku. The Japanese influence is further evident in that the poems echo Matsuo Bash’s travel journals. The most significant part of this book, however, is the brief play The Image Maker. The chief character in this play is a santero, a carver and repairer of saint statues in a Caribbean village. He is obviously a maker in the Aristotelian sense. He and his society practice Santería, a Latin American religion that combines Christian concepts with Yoruba lore from West African religions. In Santería, the saints have double characters, their beneficent Christian side and an opposite side that belongs to a pagan deity, Chango, who is violent and chaotic. Merrill’s work has always been concerned with doubleness, and this situation provides him with an opportunity to explore it. Although the santero has the skill to shape the saints’ figures and dress, their inner lives belong equally to good and evil. Thus the maker can provide a symbol but has no control over the actions resulting from his creations. When the santero is called away from his combined home and workplace by the voice of the damaged Saint Barbara, who imitates the voice of his sickly and whining mother, the santos come to life and their wild and evil selves prevail. Francisco kills the pet dove, and Barbara sets fire to a wall calendar, thus destroying all the holy days. When the santero returns, he cleans up the mess, then appeases Chango with cigar smoke and a ceremony, and returns to his work of repairing Barbara.

Merrill here continues some of the concepts from The Changing Light at Sandover. Just as the familiars from another world had insisted, the creative artist of any kind does not have control over the effects of creation. God B and Mother Nature lament this fact in The Changing Light at Sandover. Although not knowing how a created work will turn out has negative aspects, it can have positive aspects as well. The discovery in the work not only may affect the work but also can have profound effects on the maker. Merrill says, “Writing his or her poems changes a poet, over the years, in ways that perhaps time or society by themselves couldn’t.”

Moreover, the artist does not know when he or she begins how the product will turn out. The artist is often surprised, because the materials for the work discover their possibilities as the process proceeds. This play affirms the “V Work” and provides, as well, a miniature of one of the major concepts of The Changing Light at Sandover—the multifaceted nature of human beings. In a simple yet profound way, it demonstrates that cleaning up is one of the virtues and explores once again the complex relationship between reality and illusion.

There is no doubt that the Sandover trilogy affected Merrill’s work. This does not mean that the subsequent poems are lesser. It may mean that as his work took new turns, the later work was glossed by The Changing Light at Sandover rather than the reverse. Merrill’s work is of major importance for its poetic technique, for his brilliant use of language, and for the quality of the imagination he displays. Moreover, his exploration of metaphysical concerns that are universal and timeless puts it among works of important thought.

A Scattering of Salts

A Scattering of Salts, published in 1995 after Merrill’s death, was the last book he saw through production. Although Merrill had written about death before, those poems in this final collection that address mortality, fragility, aging, and the passage of time acquire particular irony and poignancy. Still, as readers of Merrill might expect, even in the most serious and sometimes bitter poems, humor—jokes, wordplay, topical allusions—nearly always forms a part of the poet’s scheme.

The book’s title offers insight into its perspective. Merrill makes use of most of the familiar proverbial or biblical references to salt in a number of these poems. The first poem, “A Downward Look,” plays on the image of salts in a bath wherein one sees the “sky.” The last poem in the collection, suitably called “An Upward Look,” refers to the superstition of keeping Satan at a distance by scattering salt on the ground, to the tradition of tossing a pinch of spilled salt over one’s shoulder to avoid bad luck, and to the biblical expression “salt of the earth.” Yet whereas “A Downward Look” sounds a cheerful note (a baby’s hand is among the last images), “An Upward Look” is about burial—and, perhaps, a kind of resurrection.

Between these two complementary poems are other works of varying length about themes that always surface in Merrill’s poetry. Some poems that feature members of his family (for instance, the touching “My Father’s Irish Setters” and “164 East 72nd Street”), in others humor dominates (“Scrapping the Computer”), and in still others, the meaning of life itself is the subject in one way or another (“Tony: Ending the Life”). Merrill nearly allows the book to end on a note of profound bitterness. His “Self Portrait in Tyvek (TM) Windbreaker” energetically, and often comically, excoriates politicians, cheap sex, lazy parents, false camaraderie, and “Ecosaints” as well as those who have defiled nature. The collection ends, however, without bitterness: The last three lines of Merrill’s last poem, “An Upward Look,” must be read as signs of hope:

First the grave dissolving into dawnthen the crucial recrystallizingfrom inmost depths of clear dark blue.