Merrill's task in ordering, condensing, and presenting [a] welter of material, under the gun of urgency and haste, staggers the imagination; who else could have done what he did half so well? (pp. 14-15)

Whatever Mirabell's shortcomings may ultimately be judged to be, they are not metrical; Merrill's versification is the best there is….

If dark but benevolent powers spoke to you, asking for POEMS OF SCIENCE to save the world, what would you do? I wish I thought nobody would dismiss as a garrulous eccentricity a book that is in sober truth a marvel; one might as readily dismiss Dante, whose chief advantage was that the whole civilized western world believed in his vision without having shared it literally. For Dante the question of belief never arose; for Merrill it arises continually if allowed to. Merrill himself is healthy and sane, and he is nobody's fool. (p. 15)

[Certain] aspects of the matter of Mirabell are likely to strike readers as problematical…. By portraying intelligent poetic and musical gays as the evolutionary crème de la crème, Merrill makes himself vulnerable to charges of narcissism; the same could be said of passages in which heaven lavishes praise upon its spokesmen….

And every bit of this vulnerability must have been painfully obvious to Merrill himself. Yet what was he to do, short of doubting the entire experience to the point of abandoning it and the poem; and which of us, caught up in such an experience for such a purpose, would have done that? Or, if not rejecting commandment and covenant outright, should he have picked and chosen among the revelations like churchgoers of a certain stripe, tossing out anything that didn't please him or that would show himself and DJ in too favorable (hence too smug) a light and keeping the rest?

In fact, the poem is full of ideas and values "authenticated"—if that's the word—chiefly by their negation of ideas and values familiar from Merrill's entire oeuvre to this point. Could anyone have anticipated that a poet who had so consistently put down ideas and current affairs and praised the sensual life would ever find himself warning the world that mind and reason must defeat feeling if the greenhouse is to survive? Science isn't "his" kind of material ("Poems of Science? Ugh.") any more than the bat-centaur myth is "his" kind of myth, despite the intriguing and poetically effective coincidence of the bat-motif on carpet and wallpaper in the house in Stonington. It's easy to suppose that he may have dwelt so long on Akhnaton and Thebes because, in all the conglomeration of detail, with that opulent pageantry he could for a change feel really at home. Skeptical himself to the end, wishing to the end for an unequivocal feather of proof that this otherworldly seminar is something other than two decades and more of self-deception, Merrill has given on to us—rashly? courageously?—what has been given to him from somewhere, in a work ambitious in scope and execution beyond anything I know of in this century's poetry, or in that of most others.

As far as his execution goes, it's chiefly by contrast with The Book of Ephraim that flaws in Mirabell can be spotted. Mind you: The Book of Ephraim is a genuinely great poem—a phrase no one should use lightly—and very possibly the most impressive poetic endeavor in English in this century. I have no wish to seem ungenerous to Mirabell by praising the earlier work at its expense, particularly since it seems clear that such differences as there are can be accounted for by differences in the circumstances of composition. Still, something should be said about why, page for page, Ephraim is better poetry…. Ephraim is also fairly gentle on the contemporary sensibility and limited credulity; like The Turn of the Screw, and (to a lesser extent) Pale Fire, it can be read comfortably on the objective level and the possibly unbalanced subjective level at once….

But the operative factor is time. The Ouija experiences narrated in Ephraim accumulated through twenty years, during most of which life for DJ and JM was going on pretty much as usual. That the Mirabell material too would have aged to its advantage is obvious, intensely so, to Merrill—who at the outset had let himself convince himself that matter is but excuse for manner…. True enough as far as it goes; what a poem's about matters less to its success than how well it's put together. But the analogy is false, as Mirabell could have told him and all but did. What the poem's about can effect how well it's put together; and in the event Merrill finds himself possessed of matter urgently important in itself, too much so to be left to the sea-changes of the unconscious….

Mirabell is a work … that only James Merrill at the peak of his powers could have brought off. Its surface is so smooth that without Ephraim as foil I doubt whether anyone would have thought to wonder, or wonder so soon, if the revelations of Mirabell and the poet's own sensibility and personality (pace Eliot) weren't rather superficially interpenetrated, how much sympathetic vibration they really show. The rich whole of Merrill's life—emotional, psychological, intellectual, existential—made a complex alembic to process and transform, and be transformed by, the experiences which became Ephraim, so that the poem comes to us from the center of Merrill's art and self, and in no sense straight from the soul of a Greek slave spelling out words on a board. Those twenty years allowed as well for imaginative manipulation of the story, invention of character and event consistent with, but not directly derived from, the Ouija transcripts: a making over of it all into something wholly Merrill's own.

The comparative "rawness" of Mirabell shows precisely in contrast to those transformations of the Ephraim material which time and time alone can render….

If the matter of Mirabell is still more Mirabell's (and Auden's and Maria's and so on) than their beloved JM's, yet the wit, the lyric interludes, the passages of flawless formal verse, those ingots are stamped as clearly with Merrill's mark as anything he ever wrote, including Ephraim, and offer the same delight.

The revelations in Mirabell can come to seem less fascinating than the very phenomenon of Revelation, descending upon "prophets" chosen and prepared through a quarter-century of shared experience and love, yet as unlikely and initially sometimes as unwilling as prophets are often found to be, much of whose interest in their Board was frivolous, and one of whom had refused for years to take a scrap of responsibility upon himself for society at large—now required to play Jeremiah and acceeding. Some part of truth, possibly not cosmic, does reside in this, if only the truth that Life continues to be, for mortal readers, the eternally fascinating, moving, gripping sphere that takes hold of our fancy and won't let go….

I suppose there may be readers who come to Mirabell seeking Truth, or who think they may have found it there. Their guess is as good as mine. But everyone should be urged to read the book first for its poetry…. Those "genre" passages, glimpses of JM and DJ going about their life together when not joined at the Board, are my favorite thing in the book—funny, touching, true beyond question. (p. 16)