Divine Comedies is the watershed book of James Merrill's life as a poet. Characterized by resolution and reconciliation and by Proustian recall, it is his most important book. It displays Merrill at the peak of his lyrical and narrative powers; but it's a dense, strenuous book…. At the same time it is innocent of the charge of hermeticism, as his last two volumes were not. Difficult of access as these poems are, only a page or so is downright impossible; and for the first time Merrill has made available to readers, on the copyright page, sources of information outside his text…. Inevitably The Book of Ephraim overshadows [the] lesser Divine Comedies; but each of the long poems in Part I (and at least one of the three single-pagers that bracket and bisect them, a sweet-natured character sketch called Manos Karastefanís) is wonderful in its own way. All the long poems share a family resemblance as to form (loose pentameter, rhyme consistent or haphazard), ambition of scope, density of language, and intricacy of pattern.

To any reader familiar with Merrill's earlier work, held together by passion and problematical family relations at the vital center, the most inescapable resolutions of this new book are sexual and familial. (p. 40)

One of this poet's most remarkable and endearing qualities has always been his ability and willingness—save in extremis—to gather even the most dismal and disheartening situations of which his poems treat into a kind of unfaked, unforced "happy ending"; and in Divine Comedies too, in spite of his belief that the part of living he has cared about most is over for him, every poem resolves in the way of the pastoral elegy, and as et vitam venturi saeculi supersedes crucifixus est. (p. 41)

Though his poems never fake an affirmative conclusion, Merrill's first novel—The Seraglio (1957)—announced two resolutions prematurely, presenting as convictions what were in fact still wishful thinking. The novel's hero (and Merrill's persona), Francis Tanning, is shown in the moments of reconciling himself both with his parents and to the world's reality; yet books published years after The Seraglio proved repeatedly how much unresolved Oedipal tension remained. Merrill's poem on the Psyche-Eros myth, From the Cupola, for instance—the most hauntingly memorable lyrical statement in Nights and Days—describes winged Eros in many guises and Aphrodite as a terrifyingly maternal coconut palm…. Now, twenty years after the false resolution of The Seraglio and a decade after From the Cupola appeared in Poetry, comes Lost in Translation with a natural, believable reconciliation. This poem, one of the most nearly flawless in Divine Comedies, retells and mythologizes the Proustian episode of Merrill, as a child, putting together a puzzle with his nanny during "A summer without parents"; and it mentions in passing some puzzlepieces cut into recognizable shapes, each a symbol from Merrill's personal repertoire:

          Witch on broomstick, ostrich, hourglass,
          Even (surely not just in retrospect)
          An inchling, innocently branching palm.

This is a "palm" in two senses, one allied to Urania's "rosy-fingered flexings", tiny, harmless, and one which reappears as the poem ends—inconsequentially as it may seem—unless that towering moonstruck other palm tree has stayed in the mind…. The violence and terror of that earlier palm is brought to diminutive harmlessness as the poem is brought—by intensifying the poetic elements of its language—to symphonic resolution.

We know from Braving the Elements that the "S" referred to at the end of Lost in Translation is a young Greek named Strato, the epicenter of Merrill's love life for a number of years; and another reason to call Divine Comedies a watershed book is that for the first time Merrill takes the reader's awareness of his homosexuality for granted, so that no love poem of his need ever again be weakened by a nameless, faceless, genderless "you" at its heart…. Yánnina and Lost in Translation, both because they deal with Merrill's family history and because they are nearly perfect poems judged by the highest standards of style, compression, thematic integration, risk, and adequate accessibility, are the most "important" in Part I; and they do convey the sense that Merrill has really made his necessary peace with [his] problematical memories at last…. The four [other poems], as much as these, are worked together with complete attention to every descriptive and linguistic detail, and to the levels and layers behind every word and phrase with more than one meaning, like "palm", above. And every one of these six would stand out, some more and some less brilliantly but all brilliantly enough to deserve the word, in a less ambitious collection.

McKane's Falls is the only long poem in Part I of emphatically greater lyrical than narrative strength, and the only one seriously concerned with circumstances memorable from an earlier book (Braving the Elements). It's a stunning piece, displaying Merrill at his purely stylistic best, than which there is no better…. McKane's Falls expresses a different sort of reconciliation: an explicit breakaway—supported by lines in other Divine Comedies poems—from Merrill's career-long commitment to the integrity of masks and surfaces…. (pp. 42-4)

The relative nature of Truth is twice insisted on in Divine Comedies, but never before has Merrill expressed a willingness to penetrate appearances in quest of any "inside story", since until this volume of passion's ebbing, truth was held to be the enemy of love. This is the first of his books in which light is viewed as a friendly force, or a companion asked to "See through me. See me through", or a woman seen as "Lovelier … without make-up", or full value given to the sort of love that transcends passion and outlasts it. The passage of time on a cosmic and/or personal scale occurs as a theme in every long poem…. Merrill is obviously preoccupied with the ravages of passing time, but his work has always been singularly free of self-pity…. (pp. 44-5)

The Will, a complex and fascinating surrealistic poem placed last in Part I, gathers together all the major themes explored in this first third of the book—family, time, passion and its lapse—withing the context of the great theme about to dominate the rest of it: Ephraim, Ouija, the Other World, the death which is sea-change and loss rather than annihilation. Is it possible, I wonder, for any reader unaware of Merrill's preference for saying serious things lightly to realize how serious he is about all this?… [No] poetry of Merrill's ever was less frivolous; for in it his marrow-deep mistrust of our world, the "real" world—with which both his novel and all his other books of verse were saturated—has finally given way. (p. 45)

Ephraim is no flimsy figment of Merrill's imagination, made up one dull day out of whole cloth; the poet has lived with the virtually unaltered idea of him for upwards of twenty years. A little simple collating shows how closely detail in The Book of Ephraim corresponds to detail in The Seraglio, where Francis and his Italian lover Marcello make contact with a spirit calling himself Meno. Save for a bit of portentous 1950's censorship (incest is substituted for homosexuality as the "perversion" ascribed to the Emperor Caligula) and truncation of the story-line, the discrepancies in cosmology, physical and biographical details ascribed to Meno/Ephraim, even transcriptions of dialogue, are minor. (pp. 46-7)

This very long poem's major theme, as announced in Section A, was to have been "an old, exalted one: / The incarnation and withdrawal of / A god." In fact, it's hard to tell to what extent the "god", Ephraim, as representative of the spirit world, withdraws, and to what extent he is gradually abandoned, dismissed, as Merrill's preference for the earthly world increases. In Section X Ephraim is still featured as "the latest / Recurrent figure out of mythology / To lend his young beauty to a living grave / In order that Earth bloom another season"; but there's no evidence to show he does this voluntarily. He wants to keep in touch; it's his mediums who give him no chance to.

The Book of Ephraim is only the newest and most persuasive treatment of Merrill's choosing-the-world theme…. [As far back as The Seraglio] Francis accepts his unwilling loss of the spirit world and manages somehow to believe in this one…. (p. 47)

Section Z, finally, describes the carton of Ephraim's transcripts in Stonington which now might as well be burned, for surely no one will ever read them again. In fact, the wish to burn them accords with Tiberius's wish for his own manuscript buried in its bronze box "UNDER PORPHYRY", and with Auden's for his box of papers in Oxford "that must QUICKLY BE / QUICKLY BURNED"…. Ephraim's transcripts are spared, though a door is shut upon them with a sound of finality. Life, itself, the Real, intervenes to save them, demonstrating again the other world's dependency upon the real world; for while debate is underway the phone, becoming a metaphorical lifeline as well as a literal one, interrupts:

      So, do we burn the—Wait, the phone is ringing:
      Bad connection; babble of distant talk;
      No getting through. We must improve the line
      In every sense, for life….

The reader is left believing that the affair with Ephraim, whether or not it has quite ended (that point is left unsettled), will never again seduce Merrill away from the life he means to improve the line—the telephone line, the line of verse—for. (pp. 50-1)

It is, finally, impossible to establish by the poem's own lights and terms whether or not the Other World is meant to be understood as objectively real. Its status is actually less important than this very ambiguity: the impossibility of proving that it is or isn't real, and the possibility that it may be just as real, or more real (as Merrill believed for a long time), than the world we live in. Merrill himself isn't sure. But "Ephraim, my dear, let's face it," he says. "If I fall / From a high building, its your name I'll call … / Let's face it: the Unconscious, after all…". The Unconscious, after all, just won't quite do. Merrill's choice for the world of "grim truths" must be understood not as a rational conclusion that Ephraim has been only a scion of his imagination and David Jackson's … or of their combined Unconsciouses …, but as an existential preference arrived at over many years without knowing even now whether the real world is any more real than the other world, without—finally—needing to know anything except that this world, our world, is the one he belongs to.

The recurrent command to BURN THE BOX—"demotic" for "Children while you can, let some last flame / Coat these walls, the lives you lived, relive them"—is the final consequence of Merrill's involvement with the other world. With Divine Comedies this command has been obeyed. In the long poem in which it is transcribed, as well as in all the lyrical narratives of Part I, the flame that burns is the flame not of passion but of memory. (p. 53)