[In the following essay, McClatchy studies the elusive poems of Country of a Thousand Years of Peace.]

Eight years elapsed between James Merrill's First Poems (1951) and the publication of The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, the longest interval between any two of his poetry collections. During that time Merrill made two important moves. One, his change of residence from New York City to Stonington, a traditional Connecticut seacoast village, was a kind of strategic withdrawal and resettlement that had decisive repercussions on his work, though not until Water Street (1962) does a more domestic focus prevail. The other move, an elaborate and prolonged trip around the world, is more immediately apparent in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace. The literal extravagance of Merrill's travels is reflected in two ways. In an obvious sense, the volume is decked out with a good deal of local color. Without ever being merely diaristic, he takes advantage of the convention that a travel poem is to make observations. He can count on a reader's unfamiliarity with and interest in a foreign curiosity or custom. The exotic locales of many of these poems—Japan, India, Greece, Switzerland, Holland, France—are an indication not only of a more cosmopolitan viewpoint, but also of Merrill's increased respect for the genius of places. The settings of First Poems are usually the stanzas of the poems themselves, or the associations their symbols have staked out, or the compass of the poet's own imagination. These new, more varied and specific settings are a recognition of a world outside the boundaries of verse and the self, and of the poet's ability to explore it—a recognition, that is, of history, of events located in space and unfolding in time, of significance emerging from process rather than embodied in a product. In much the same way, this book, instead of confining itself to a limited, recurring set of self-conscious symbols and subliminal anxieties, deliberately takes up a range of experiences that lie beyond the ego recording them—hallucinations, ouija board transmissions, revenants, altered states, dreamwork and rituals, the whole welter of the preconscious life that is also a “starry land/Under the world,” as the title poem describes its mythic country of death. These two impulses in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace—a recognition of history, and the cultivation of the unconscious—will, in later books, each be developed in more intricate ways, and together be combined into Merrill's attention to involuntary memories and archetypal characterizations of his past. Here, they remain impulses rather than habits.

Seeking to account for the advance this book marks over First Poems, Richard Howard argued that the “patinated narcissism has been literally roughed up, and the resulting corrugation of surface corresponds, of course, to a new agitation of the depths.” Howard is right to stress the connection between the book's adjusted technique and its more adventuresome subject matter, but wrong to suggest that this results from a kind of stylistic decomposition. There is less Art than in First Poems, but more artfulness. It is true that the poems are projected on a smaller scale than most of his First Poems, and their very concision—to say nothing of their sometimes willful obliquity—may leave some readers with the impression that the book as a whole is more thematically skittish and less formally ambitious than its predecessor. Certainly this book does specialize in that sort of poem Merrill himself calls, in a review he wrote at the time of someone else's work, “a small, perfect poem—whose subject matter may even be calculated not to engage a reader overmuch; something leanly modeled, its elements composed and juxtaposed to give a sense of much ground covered in mysterious ways.” The direct proportion between smallness and perfection duly noted, it bears repeating that The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace does represent an advance. An earned mastery of technique is in charge: the mazy syntax, the more expertly fractioned rhythms, the greater variety and convincing flexibility of verse schemes. Sometimes these techniques are subtle enough to distract attention from their own ingenuity—the leisurely runs of blank verse, for instance, or a sonnet in discrete couplets, or his occasional use of apocopated schemes where the rhymes are present but never insistent. There is also more sparkle and salt in this book, the free-wheeling play of mind that comes with technical control. There is a greater ease in generalizing. This is not a question of his having created slots in a poem through which messages can be slipped, but of having learned to allow his nimble intelligence to indulge its conceptual tendencies by means of aphorism and pithy aside. In “Midas Among Goldenrod,” the hay-fevered hero's mouth “Shuts and opens like a ventriloquist's dummy/Eloquent with opinions it does not really believe.” The “Italian Lesson” turns to Roman promenades “Where each cool eye plays moth/To flames largely its own.” And in one especially sly witticism, the geography of Europe is outlined by re-enacting the rape of Europa, who is left—“The god at last indifferent,” as in Yeats's sonnet—“no longer chaste but continent.” The book's intellectual prowess is also noticeable in grander, more virtuosic ways. Several times, for instance—“The Octopus” and “The Lovers” are the most striking cases—a poem's overly abstract issues or too intimate donnée are handled by a single extended simile, the magnet of the initial comparison drawing to itself filings of phrase and detail. “The Lovers” begins: “They met in loving like the hands of one / Who. … ” The rest of the poem works out the terms of the analogy and never returns to its point of departure—does not need to, the simpler image having explained the complex emotion.

But this artful control seems to bring with it, almost inevitably for a poet as mercurial as Merrill, a certain restlessness, sometimes spirited, sometimes coy. To its advantage, the book is teased, not hauled, into thought, and at the same time can entertain uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. But occasionally a poem's very elegance and equanimity serve to disguise the obscurity of its subject or treatment. It is difficult to say how “About the Phoenix” moves from one florid or puzzling point to another; it is difficult to say what “A View of the Burning” is about at all. Part of the difficulty here results from a quite conscious decision by the poet to favor a chiaroscuro that dissolves a poem's structural plan into figural textures. Or, when plotting his more overtly narrative poems—“The Day of the Eclipse” or the waggish “A Narrow Escape” are convenient examples—he tends to focus on a moment before or after the action's climax, so that revelations are implied or displaced, and the emotional force of the poem depends on a reader's sense of anticipation or presumed relief. Insofar as this is a deliberate method to avoid any topical or moralizing pretensions—as, in later books, he often shies from the pitch of the sublime or from autobiography's call to candor—it is not unlike Borges's musing, in his essay “The Wall and the Books,” that “music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.” Such a wise but wary passivity, while not exactly an abdication of the poet's responsibility to both shape and interpret his material, depends too much on what has been excluded from the poem, on what is not taken on or worked out.

Part of the difficulty The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace presents to a reader undoubtedly stems from the kind of material it engages—material that, despite the poetic skills used to render it, is elusive. “The Cruise,” an otherwise charming anecdote, can be read as an allegory of the entire book's endeavor and problem. Having passed a less than imaginary iceberg whose hidden menace reminds them of “That law of which nine-tenths is a possession/By powers we do not ourselves possess,” the ship's passengers are shopping in a port of call, and shown “Monsters in crystal” that once—so they are told—were nightmares that “set aswirl the mind of China” until “belittled” by craftsmen who dealt them the “drug of Form.” Purchased as souvenirs—“We took to lunch our monsters wrapped in silk”—these talismans come both to reassure and to accuse. First, the speaker wonders whether a practiced style of personality makes for a perfect social presence: “Are we less monstrous when our motive slumbers/ Drugged by a perfection of our form?” The question could as easily refer, of course, to the poetic struggle between conspicuous form and shadowy intention, or even dark inspiration. Those two readings, the personal and the literary, are together poised in the poem's final lines, in their open competition between fascination and abhorrence, between

our hungers and our dread
That, civilizing into cunning shape
Briefly appeased what it could not oppose.

Naturally it is an uneasy situation that an appeasing dread, linked with knowlege and form, substitutes for any stronger, permanent shield against the devouring … the devouring what? The monsters are never identified. Are they the wilds of the unconcious? the toils of guilt? the trials of love? the past? the future? The figure of speech is the real appeasement here. And throughout the book, in some of its best as well as in many of its weakest poems, there is a similar reticence. It is hard to say whether it is the result of a poem's ignorance of its own final purposes, or of an inadequacy of form to ambition, or of some collusion of the two. Beginning with Water Street, his poems increasingly show a clear-eyed understanding and ironic appreciation of themselves. And the long poems in Nights and Days demonstrate, in ways that these earlier poems never realize, how their hybrid form and variegated tone are more than adequate to the scope and demands of the material. But The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace—perhaps for the wrong reasons, his most enigmatic book until Braving the Elements (1973)—remains at once inviting and uncertain. The book's good manners seem to force the poet to hesitate before the new and surprising depths he has discovered.

2

The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace opens with an elegy for Hans Lodeizen, and closes with a dedication to him. Lodeizen (1924-1950), a Dutch poet, author of Het innerlijk behand (The Inner Wallpaper—shades of Mirabell), had come to America to do graduate work at Amherst, where Merrill met him in 1946. The two young poets kept up a friendship, by occasional visits and correspondence, until Lodeizen's death four years later. Their last visit, the pretext of the title poem's elegy, was recalled once by Merrill in a paragraph introducing the poem:

That death and the unfulfilled promise of an idealized friend so near his own age must have haunted Merrill: the meaningless death accusing, he implies, his then purposeless life. But the close, ennobling identification with Lodeizen precludes much guilt. As tutelary spirit of the book, he is apostrophized in “Dedication.” The poem is placed last in the volume presumably to stress its sense of dedication as proclamation and resolve rather than as merely a memorial gesture. What it proclaims are privileged moments. Twice in this brief poem the equation of mind and mouth, of idea and speech, is made. These are moments of poetic inspiration—moments of which each preceding poem in the book has given evidence—that are characterized as both ecstatic and humbling, and linked by Merrill less with grief at Lodeizen's death than with gratitude for his example. In one image, his death is described as the Orphic “deep spring,” the continually self-renewing source of poetic power; in another, Hans returns as a Rilkean angel. This is the heroic side of him that the title poem—less an elegy really than a tribute—emphasizes as well. There is a tone of angry bewilderment, not at his friend's eventual fate but at his treatment. Twice Merrill repeats “It was a madness” that Lodeizen be deprived of his death, so that each day was “somewhat/Less than you could bear.” The final two stanzas, completing the poem's single-sentence contradiction of the “peaceful” commonplace of death, begin as a curious rebuttal of Auden. In his “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Auden complacently says the Old Masters were never wrong about suffering because they realized its “human position.” Merrill's “old masters of disease” are doctors, not painters, and they make him “cry aloud” at the intolerable human position in which they confine Lodeizen. They would kill him by keeping him alive; they

Would coax you still back from that starry
land
Under the world, which no one sees
Without a death, its finish and sharp weight
Flashing in his own hand.

The doctor's Damoclean sword becomes the hero's emblem. Its finish and weight (the pronomial ambiguity cleverly giving those qualities to death as well as to the sword) might also be the lyre's, since the unnamed but apposite hero here is Orpheus.

Lodeizen is not Auden's falling boy, but the questing adventurer. And he signals a shift from the typical protagonist of First Poems—the child, the innocent, the victim—to a more mature, though not necessarily less vulnerable persona—often a lover, an artist, a martyr, “a young man.” This is a step toward autobiography, or at least toward the more naturalistic possibilities of direct address. But a poem's speaker and the poet's self are rarely merged in this book, only paralleled. “I” is used as a point of view. When more intimate or complex or troubling matters are raised, a surrogate is introduced. “Saint” is an example. It is a poem about the artist's practicing for eternity, with overtones that are both erotic and deadly. There are two figures: the “you” that is the speaker's own reflexive self, and the titular saint, Sebastian. These figures are set against the background of a crowd—almost a chorus and not unlike the “old masters” in the Lodeizen elegy—first of the soldier's executioners, then transformed into the saint's worshippers. And just as the two crowds, hooded archers and numbling old women, are ironic versions of each other, so too are the figures, the “young martyr” and the yearning poet, a single split personality. Sebastian has only an iconic reality, as a series of images or fantasies the speaker has of himself. The poem opens tentatively, its first word meaning both to lack and to desire, its second line equivocating:

Wanting foreknowledge of eternity
It may be you must learn
From an illumination, from an ivory triptych,
How the young martyr, stripped
And fastened to the trunk of a fruit-bearing
Tree, could in a fanfare
Of tenderness for their reluctance summon
Those hooded archers: Come!
The arrows! Come! He loves me best who nearest
To my heart hits! In love and fear
They let fly.

Left unanswered here is the question of why you want that foreknowledge. And are we to understand it to be erotic bliss or aesthetic perfection? The “illumination” is no fixed image or goal, and the excited fable is sexual but only when it is not sentimental, in the manner of T.S. Eliot's “Death of Saint Narcissus.” The martyr's ecstasy or divine possession is clearly a projection of the speaker's longing for “eternity”—but for actual sublimity, or for the lifeless perfection beyond the “heart”? The reader is encouraged (or forced, according to his temper) to imply from the manifest details the poem's latent dilemma. The speaker's “you”—a reference to his distance or even alienation from himself—is no martyr, no Aeolian lyre fastened to a tree and struck by the arrows of inspiration, his efforts bear no fruit. At this point, and after such knowledge, the poem begins again:

Wanting endurance of that moment's
Music, you are afraid. Below
Your hotel window, the piazza blackens
And hisses. You do not draw back,
You hold it all in your eye's mind.

Looking up from the imaginary portrait of Sebastian that has so kindled his mind's eye, the speaker's double returns to meditate on reality—through a “hotel window” that opposes the mirroring page, the hissing a black parody of possible music. There is an evident disgust in the language he uses to describe the life before, or literally beneath him—those limping, dribbling, mumbling women. Their “hocus-pocus” and their “dyed breaths” and “human acids” are a mean inversion of the articulate energy to which the young man aspires, and with which the saint rises above them all “exuberantly” with a warning that could speak for them both: “He kisses me who kills, who kills me kisses! The poem then attempts a strange reconciliation. The three deaths—the romantic martyrdom, the wormdrilled baroque statue, and the poet's despair—give way to a timeless pastoral, a classic “endurance”:

And what is learned? Just this:
He is the flaw through which you can glimpse
        meadows,
Herds, the lover piping with bent head.

The moralized scene of instruction is another piece of dreamwork, and combines the two men in a stylized innocence at once solipsistic and homoerotic: the piazza becomes a meadow, the worshippers are changed to a herd; the soldier-saint is mistaken for an idyllic text, the poet fancies himself the piping lover. But again, the figures are separated, and the poem returns to an ironic contemplation of itself, this time with a bitter, imprisoned finality:

Full of the scene, you turn back in
To serve your time. The damask bed
Creaks under you. The board groans, the stone
        wrinkles—
Eternity refusing to begin.

The poem seems unresolved because it cannot make up its mind, does not care to. On the one hand, it evokes the sources of pain and power, and diffidently suggests a literary solution. On the other hand, its ends or ambition refuse to begin, and the poem turns into the familiar modern fable about the impossibility of its own accomplishment.

“Saint” is followed in the book by “The Charioteer of Delphi,” essentially the same poem but plainer and less febrile. Merrill has taken the famous statue and reimagined its athlete as Phaeton—like Lodeizen and Sebastian another youthful victim, the memory of whose downfall still scorches. He has further conflated that sun-myth with Socrates's story in the Phaedrus of the winged steeds of reason and passion. The poem, then, begins with a question about its own subject—“Where are the horses of the sun?”—and continues by tracing the initial “havoc” caused by “the killing horses” from the myth of the dazzled son to actual memories shared by the inquiring speaker and the child he protectively addresses. The poem's self-conscious layering merely augments, by postponing, its conclusion:

Broken from his mild reprimand
In fire and fury hard upon the taste
Of a sweet license, even these have raced
Uncurbed in us, where fires are fanned.

Invariably, the best poems in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace have a similar taste for sweet license, for an abandon and risk belied by their superficial self-confidence. Despite alluring or even learned trappings, they pursue resolutely what another poem calls “the inner adventure,” and what “The Charioteer of Delphi” identifies as “fires.” Several poems in the book enlarge upon that metaphor. “Fire Poem” is one. Like “The Cruise” with its encrystaled monsters, or “Laboratory Poem” with its chilling climb through violence into “exquisite disciplines,” “Fire Poem” takes up the conflict between passion and intelligence, between ardor and ashes, the song of once-burned innocence and twice-shy experience. After a theatrical introduction—the speaker and his companion seated before the hearth's stage, a scene replayed in The Fire Screen (1969)—the fire itself speaks:

If as I am you know me bright and warm,
It is while matter bears, which I live by,
For very heart the furnace of its form:
By likeness and from likeness in my storm
Sheltered, can all things change and changing
be
The rare bird bedded at the heart of harm.

The language here is deliberately intense. Since we are first told that the fire “Built brightness in the eye already bright,” it is fair to assume that the fire's italicized sermon might as well be a reverie by the speaker himself—or by the “laughing child” who, entranced by the prospect of transformation, “Reached for the fire and screamed.” Like the charioteer, the child is burned. The phoenix-like possibilities of “change and changing,” the escape from mere “likeness,” that the fire announced are at once forgotten in the disillusioning pain and fear: “fire thereafter was the burnt child's name / For fear.” Even—or, especially—the symbolic function of language, to reclaim and transform phenomena, is lost. In a sense, then, “Fire Poem” is a self-consuming artifact, and it is because the vision is literalized and wrongly acted upon that experience hurts and words fail. Much later, such playing with fire will earn Ephraim's rebuke: “Look Yr Fill / but do do do do nothing.”

A similar point is made, in a lighter vein and in reverse, by “The Doodler.” It is a poem about “communing”—consciously with others over the telephone, and unconsciously with the self as the speaker idly doodles on a pad while talking. (The model of psychotherapy is clear but not stressed.) The first half of the poem draws the connection between the isolated human features obsessively figured out—kohl-daubed eyes, profiled noses, lips pursed and raised to anyone's but his—and the distant voices on the line, except that the drawings seem “more animate/Than any new friend's voice.” The regressive inner adventure then beings with his admission that “nothing I do is at all fine / Save certain abstract forms. These come unbidden.” What wells up is not an involuntary memory of Merrill's own, but the apparatus of a poem—“Stars, oblongs linked, or a baroque motif”—that finally assembles the “least askew of ikons” whom “The Doodler” first sets out to greet. It is an image with a life of its own—or so the poet imagines—who even begins to decipher the designing poet as “He-Who-endures-the-disembodied-Voice.”

Far, far behind already is that aeon Of pin-heads, bodies each a ragged weevil, Slit-mouthed and spider-leggèd, with eyes like gravel,

Wavering under trees of purple crayon.

Shapes never realized, were you dogs or chairs? That page is brittle now, if not long burned. This morning's little boy stands (I have learned To do feet) gazing down a flight of stairs.

The situation here anticipates that of “Lost in Translation,” where the young Merrill pieces together the puzzle revealing the page-boy. The little boy brought to light by “The Doodler” has no immediate autobiographical significance, but is a shape of things to come in Merrill's work, a realized shape of his own past. And the image's associations are crucial. The boy's emergence as both a recognizable figure and as a resonant symbol (what he stands for) is linked with the poet's own ability—his having “learned / To do feet.” That achievement uncovers the past and its emotional dimensions, though this little boy's loneliness—like that of Proust's Marcel at the top of the stairs—is left for now in outline. “Lost in Translation” concentrates retrospectively on the child's private “void.” This poem goes on, in a concluding quatrain whose miniature apotheosis spans alpha to omega (“A” to “O”), to celebrate the excited power:

And when A. calls to tell me he enjoyed The evening, I begin again. Again Emerge, O sunbursts, garlands, creatures, men, Ever more lifelike out of the white void!

A whole career, an evolving world of figures, emerges in a kind of triumphal pageant from out of the page's white void—an echo of “le vide papier” in Mallarmé's “Brise marine.” That emptiness is not only imaginative potential or experiential loss; it is the poet's subconscious as well, both image-repertoire and word-bank. They are tapped by not trying; stylized forms, not arbitrary self-expression, yield the responsive image—not an image skimmed from the moment, but one retrieved from lost time. By having learned here to endure the disembodied voices from the subconscious, and then patiently to portray their lifelike images, the poet—reinforced by A.'s approval—has every reason to begin again.

3

“Your reflect and I rejoice,” says the doodler of the image he has made—a line that draws attention to the fact that the white void may also be construed as a mirror. Several poems in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace—“Mirror” and “In the Hall of Mirrors” especially—introduce an object that comes to have a central importance for Merrill, as an emblematic prop in many of his best poems and as his recent trilogy's proscenium. Actually, this book abounds in “glassen surfaces,” several of them related to the mirror but without its thin silver mask. In “The Octopus,” for example, the “vision asleep in the eye's tight translucence” is compared to an octopus behind an aquarium's plate glass—not unlike Hugo's remark that language itself is “Tantôt comme un passant mystérieux de l'âme, tantôt comme un polype noir de l'océan pensé.” Merrill sets up a fine interplay in the poem between perception and creation, between reflecting surfaces and reflected depths, narcissistic attractions and visionary possession. The monstre sacré here is what rises to the surface: at one level an observor's dream of convulsive divinity, at another level the image of the octopus that the poet coaxes out by the “lusters” of his poem's associations. In another poem, “Some Negatives: X. at the Chateau,” the translucent eyeball is replaced by a camera lens and its “images of images.” The anti-world on film—again, a version of the subconscious—winds the speaker through a series of now paradoxical flashbacks:

Where skies are thunderous, by a cypress
walk
Copied in snow, I have you: or
Sitting beside the water-jet that here
Is jet. You could be an Ethiop with hair
Powered white as chalk …
Your charming face not lit
But charred, as by dark beams instructing it
In all to which you were the latest heir.

As the poem continues, its tone grows more unsettling. The leap from “charming” to “charred,” for instance, is even more negative than its obvious inversion. And the “ghostliness” the speaker guesses in the pictured woman comes to seem alternately more haunted and more menacing than one first suspects. As a malign, potentially monstrous dream-image, the woman may be linked with other death-dealing female figures in the book—Naomi in “Laboratory Poem,” Salome, and the vampire in “A Narrow Escape.” Further, she can be traced to the myth of Medusa that pervades First Poems, a myth that turns on a compelling horror overcome by having been reflected.

On the other side of the looking-glass, then, the life beneath the life is deeply ambivalent and to that extent disturbing. As in “The Locusts,” it can be vacantly pastoral, the imagination's paradise:

a limpid source to peer
Deep into, heaven-sent
Mirrorscope, green, wet,
All echo, orchid, and egret
In pure transports recalling you.

Or, as in the poems I have just mentioned, it can be a threatening source of psychological and emotional engulfment. These mirroring roles for the poet, Narcissus or Perseus, are ones Merrill frequently tries on in his early books. And the rivalry between them is one he must have been alert to from the start; even as an undergraduate at Amherst, he had the lead in a student production of Cocteau's Orpheus—a play in which a broken window and a standing mirror figure prominently, the mirror as a doorway for the hero to descend into the underworld and for Death, a glamorous woman in an evening gown, to enter the stage for her victims. By the time he came to write the trilogy's harmonic romance, he seems to have resolved the dilemma. It is his early books that are especially set upon by a Fury the poet only gradually interiorizes as a paramour.

This characterological ambivalence, the speaker's shifting attitudes and roles, and the equivocal female figure, occur within individual poems as well as between them. “The Day of the Eclipse” is an interesting example of this. The poem divides in two, a cause-and-effect sequence from the first nine stanzas to the concluding seven. At the outset, the poet is alone, or at least detatched, behind the summer's thin gold life mask of sun on his face. The familiar composition of place he can recall—, gull, rower, “the mirror of the tide's / Retreat”—contrasts with today's atmosphere of impending eclipse. His senses are uncertain; his spirit troubled. At this point, there is an odd vision:

There is a lone, burned child to watch
Digging so furiously for fun
As to stir up a chaos into which
They both might slip, their muscle yield
To something blinder and less skilled
Than maggots, and their boniness
Flex, fracture, effervesce,
Before the lacy vortex can be healed.

This child is, as it were, the mirror's mercury, the psychopomp leading the poet through the black field on the other side of transparent reality, conducting him through the pattern of death and resurrection Merrill's poems have favored from the start. And he is a figure who recurs, in different guises, from the ripples in the basin's “coldly wishing surface” in “The Lovers” on to Ephraim and Mirabell, whenever the mirror's hermetical associations are introduced. In this poem, the imagined downfall—half feared, half desired—is then enacted above. Like the sun, “He rises, peers up through smoked glass. / A black pupil rimmed with fire / Peers back.” The burned child here becomes a black pupil—the poet's own inward gaze and futile solipsism. In the tenth stanza, the “girl of whom he has been aware all summer” abruptly appears. “He knows that she belongs to a far more / Exciting world,” that she may be that “unique caryatid / Of the unthinkable” he has conjured from the sky's void and would court as his muse. But she is elusive, and remains “Companionless in a skylit shack,” like the “ageless woman of the world” at the end of “The Book of Ephraim,” or Mother Nature in Scripts for the Pageant. The poet remains curiously indifferent, paralyzed even, and instead of approaching her can only identify himself with the “mounds of matter cold and blind / She loves, how even they respond / To the least pressure of a shaping hand.”

The blandness of his response here—her shaping hand so much less vital than the earlier furious digging into the chaos of the self—is paralleled by the delirium of the poem titled “Amsterdam” and by the stilted fervor of “The Greenhouse.” The city and its canals are themselves seen as a vast mirror in “Amsterdam,” by virtue of the poem's epigraph—“Au pays qui te ressemble,” from “L'Invitation au voyage”—which adds to Baudelaire's invocation of “Mon enfant, ma soeur” Merrill's own implied and reflected presence. After describing the city as one where “desire is freed from the body's prison,” an apparition of that desire in the imagination's labyrinth—distilled as moon, mirror, Medusa—turns the tourist into a voyeur:

Into a black impasse deep in the maze
A mirror thrusts her brilliant severed head,
Mouth red and moist, and pale curls diamonded.
A youth advances towards the wraith, delays,
Squints through the window at a rumpled bed.

The dream-encounter that follows, in four parenthetical stanzas, though it might be with absence itself or with an abstracted ideal (“the sheer gold of nobody's hair” is its only token), and is more probably the self's apprehension of the soul, is then tentatively, yet pointedly identified when the poet awakens:

Next day, is it myself whose image those
Sunning their own on the canal's far side
Are smiling to see reel …

This difficult poem—Merrill admits in the course of it that “a future sleuth of the oblique,” more a type of the psychoanalyst than the literary critic, will be its best reader—then turns itself inside out. Macabre motifs accumulate, as if to signal the death-in-life of this particular inner adventure. In one extraordinary gesture, that links by its echo of the second stanza the poem and the mirror, the poet's own brilliant head is severed: “My head has fallen forward open-eyed.” And in a kind of reverse eclipse,

By dark the world is once again intact,
Or so the mirrors, wiped clean, try to reason …
O little moons, misshapen but arisen
To blind with the emotions they reflect!

The balance between deflection and reflection here seems both destroyed by new knowledge and restored by the verse's closure. The Orphic overtones of the poem, used here to stress the relationship between the poet and his poem's own underworld of tangled memories and fantasies, are prominent too in “The Greenhouse,” which opens with “So many girls vague in the yielding orchard” who cling to the poet and “Trailingly inquire, but similingly, of the greenhouse.” What seems at first to be a frieze of jeunes filles en fleurs gradually emerges as an animated metaphor for the poet's own green thoughts. These wilt during his allegorical descent “under glass,” until he finds himself in “the least impressive room”:

It was hotter here than elsewhere, being
shadowed
Only by bare panes overhead
And here the seedlings had been set to breeding
Their small green tedium of need:
Each plant alike, each plaintively devouring
One form, meek sprout atremble in the glare
Of the ideal condition.

This hothouse forcing-room is both hellish and brooding. The unsteady tone—a blend of condescension (“tedium”) and fear (“devouring”)—in effect forces the poet to interrupt himself as he contemplates the paradoxical lost paradise: “the fiercer fading / Of as yet nobody's beauty.” Once again, the terrible mother is transformed into a benevolent muse; the poet seeks to rescue what he would be devoured by. As in several poems in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, Merrill's latent private anxieties are manifest in familiar and recurring mythic formulas.

The whole matter of reproduction is raised in “The Greenhouse” and, naturally, in the book's other mirror-poems as well. As early as First Poems Merrill had been worrying the problem: the opposing demands of art and life. His belief in what Yeats called the perfection of the work was never in question. But the perfection of the life, insofar as that tends toward the creation of an actual and ethical family, seems to have troubled Merrill from the beginning—as it continues to in such poems as “Childlessness” in Water Street, and “The Emerald” in Braving the Elements, both of which seek to counter the hectoring expectations of others. Each sort of perfection claims to be an argument against time, but the generative task threatens Merrill's privileged status as only child in his own family romance, and as unique artist embodying himself in words. “In the Hall of Mirrors” is the most extreme and literally dazzling treatment of the problem in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace In a nearly condescending self-appraisal, Merrill once told an interviewer of the “buried meanings” that unconsciously shape and eventually sustain his poems, and he linked this with “some kind of awful religious streak just under the surface” in himself. Among the examples he then cited is “In the Hall of Mirrors”: it is “a fairly obvious case. It was written during the 1950s when the ‘myth’ poems were popular. It's about the expulsion from Eden.” Such a frank interpretation is, as usual, evasive; it buries the meaning in myth. The loss of paradise, or fall from natural grace, is not this poem's “buried meaning,” merely its conceptual scaffolding. The myth of the Fall, from which Merrill's account of the Broken Home draws much of its power, would more appropriately describe the plot of a later poem, “18 West 11th Street.” This poem is at once more complex and less resolved than its plot, and more private than its analogous myth. The setting described in the opening stanzas can be seen, in the light of Merrill's own explanation, as an Edenic locus amoenus:

The parquet barely gleams, a lake.
The windows weaken the dark trees.
The mirrors to their bosoms take
Far glints of water, which they freeze
And wear like necklaces.
Some pause in front of others with
Glimmers of mutual admiration.
Even to draw breath is uncouth.
Steps make the silver marrow spin
Up and down every spine.

The reader may be tempted here to ignore, for the sake of the fable, the deceiving force of the figuration, its stress on the reflected glories of artifice: the mirror a mother, the floor a lake, the lake a rivière, the experience embossed on a spine like any book's. There is no breath of life; all complexities of mire or blood are, like mirrors, silvered. This is no country for “Anything personal or commonplace,” as the reptilian guide “hisses” to the couple who next enter the hall. Lured by such pride and by the “good offices” of their guide's bad eminence, they are drawn into the room's infinity effect:

In one glass brow a tree is lit
That multiplies itself in tiers,
Tempting the pair to populate
Those vistas from which visitors
Ricochet in fours,
Eights, sixteens, till the first two gaze
At one another through the glazed crush
Of their own kind, and the man says,
‘Complex but unmysterious,
This is no life for us.’

The glazed crush that nearly obscures the original pair here anticipates the “fleet blur of couples / Many of whom, by now, have reproduced” that is “inflicted” on the shatterproof glass shielding Giorgione's Tempesta toward the end of “The Book of Ephraim.” In this poem, once he knows the trick, the man is bored by the repetitions. Worse, he realizes that each of the multiplying likenesses before him represents a diminishment of the self. His companion is drawn even deeper into the dilemma. She looks beyond the obvious if primal image of this stade de miroir, beyond the repetition compulsion. Unsatisfied by the infinity effect's parodic anti-paradise, she searches for imaginary and therefore “grander” images of the self:

The woman, making no reply,
Scans the remotest mirrors within mirrors
For grander figures,
Not just those of herself and him
Repeated soothingly, as though
Somebody's wits were growing dim—
Those! Those beyond!

The reactions, then, of those whom Merrill with a mischievous irony asks us to fancy our First Parents are not contradictory but complementary. Both conspire against the generative task: he derides it, she seeks to transcend it. When their guide—and one sees now why the Biblical spoiler is here a hermetic guide—says “‘Time to go,’” there is of course no reluctance or regret in their compliance. That order comes, I think, too abruptly in the poem, so that it seems to follow as an immediate consequence of an original sin of some sort of overweening narcissism. But there is no crime here, no punishment, no “expulsion.” There is, instead, a rejection of mere reproduction in favor of the poet's grander expressive figures—one of which closes the poem:

And in the solitary hall
The lobes of crystal gather dust.
From glass to glass an interval
Widens like moonrise over frost
No tracks have ever crossed.

The couple having taken their solitary way, the hall—a prototype of the trilogy's Empty Ballroom (the Galerie des Glaces was, after all, used as a salon de fête)—is empty of all but the by now familiar trope: the artistic compact, the white void, the frozen pool, the page to be written.

“In the Hall of Mirrors” begins with a refined idea of the finished book (the silvered spine), and ends by returning to the blank page of possibilities. In a sense, those are also the contrasted properties of the book's best known poem, “Mirror”: the mirror's knowing polish and the opposite window's engaging openness. But there is no simple dialectic being proposed here. Though not inaccurate, it would be too reductive to read this poem as a debate between the reflective mind and the perceiving eye, or between the poem's surfaced depths and the novel's broad perspectives, or between a perfected, stale art and natural, generational life. The poem is too astute to deal exclusively in such standard contrasts. From its abrupt opening lines—which, with their overtone of threatened individuality, seem at first to be autobiographical—this dramatic monologue is a brooding study of frustration and transfiguration. The poem begins with a sort of moral prologue, a typifying episode of barely suppressed violence:

I grow old under an intensity
Of questioning looks. Nonsense,
I try to say, I cannot teach you
children
How to live.—If not you, who will?
Cries one of them aloud, grasping my gilded
Frame till the world sways. If not
you, who will?

The violence in that passage is symptomatic of the confused anger that seems to have provoked the exchange. There are strange reversals in this poem's mirror-world. Instead of taking Merrill's preferred role of vulnerable child or artist, the mirror's disembodied voice is that of a surrogate parent, his role not that of an Oedipal tyrant but of an aging father confessor. As if having given rise to it by allowing them a look at themselves, he shares the helplessness of his children. This poem is one of such redoubled and interchanged perspectives, in fact, that we do well to remind ourselves of its possibilities of address. Whenever a mirror is questioned, who is asking what of whom? Those “questioning looks” were presumably first directed at the children themselves, as introspection rather than injunction—though that is what the question becomes when repeated. The problem presented—how to live—is as much his as theirs, as much aesthetic as moral: how to come to life, as how rightly to live. And the reiterated question—“If not you, who will?”—may stress the urgency of the children's despair, or stand as an aural image of the mirror's visual reflecting, but the echo also reminds us of the stake the mirror has in the answer to it—much as a poem makes demands on the readers who presume to search it for what will suffice.

With its irregularly metered lines and pleated apocopaic rhymes, “Mirror” has an unstanza'd, blocky look and a conversational fluency. Even so, the poem has three distinct sections. The prologue, which nervously issues the moral and aesthetic demand and establishes the complex relationships, is balanced by an answering and resolving epilogue. Between these two sections (11. 7-32) is a compressed, novelistic chronicle of the mirror's “children.” Three generations of their secret lives is what the mirror knows, much as in this description by Hawthorne a mirror holds and represents the interior life of the House of the Seven Gables: “As regards its interior life, a large, dim looking-glass used to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled to contain within its depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there.” Merrill's mirror begins with the room's still life: “Between their visits the table, its arrangement / Of Bible, fern and Paisley, all past change, / Does very nicely.” Whether that dated arrangement is incidental or is a series of metonymies for religion, domesticated nature, and decorative art, the mirror is associated with what is fixed, conventionalized, “past change.” The world of change, the works and days of human beings, are the window's province. In fact, the italicized you specifically links the window's temper with the children's importunate you at the start of the poem. As in Hardy's extraordinary poem “Moments of Vision,” whose mirror “makes of men a transparency,” here too the window and its human traffic are, in the mirror's view, all too easily seen through. The mirror's tone, from the bemused subjunctive to the waspish irony in “takes thought,” is clearly condescending:

If ever I feel curious
As to what others endure,
Across the parlor you provide examples,
Wide open, sunny, of everything I am
Not. You embrace a whole world without once
caring
To set it in order. That takes thought.

What then follows is a montage of details from real life. And if we read into them a courtship and marriage, adultery (“her first unhappiness”) and divorce, then the costume drama here is another version of Merrill's own Broken Home:

Out there
Something is being picked. The red-and-white
bandannas
Go to my heart. A fine young man
Rides by on horseback. Now the door shuts. Hester
Confides in me her first unhappiness.
This much, you see, would never have been fitted
Together, but for me. Why then is it
They more and more neglect me? Late one sleepless
Midsummer night I strained to keep
Five tapers from your breathing.
No, the widowed
Cousin said, let them go. I did.
The room brimmed with gray sound, all the instreaming
Muslin of your dream …

This uncanny nocturne—the senses's five tapers extinguished, the elegaic correspondence of the smoke's gray sound, the window's very reality turned to dream under the force of instreaming imagination—has a forlorn quality to its modulations. Both the ellipsis and the notable shift in tenses in the scene, from continuous present to past (“strained,” “said,” the decisive “I did”), marks the end of one movement, and should alert us to other changes. After all, there is a submission here and an unspoken recognition on the mirror's part—as, in Merrill's family romance, his artistic vocation is linked to his parents's divorce, so that “I did” (or made) is a parodic consequence of “I do.” The commanding “widowed / Cousin” (an antitype of Madamoiselle in Divine Comedies) might as well be a windowed cousin, whose authority the mirror obeys—as later it is amenable to a faceless will. The ellipsis signals, then, what the mirror had hitherto resisted, a change—of heart, of function, of values. That change is what gives the irony in the next lines its edge. The children turn to “muse” upon the window, and looking out at its mute poesy make the remark that concludes the poem's middle section:

Years later now, two of the grown grandchildren
Sit with novels face-down on the sill,
Content to muse upon your tall transparence,
Your clouds, brown fields, persimmon far
And cypress near. One speaks. How
superficial
Appearances are!

That dismissal, which on different readings of the poem may sound contemptuous or resolute or stricken, is a response but not an answer to the prologue's question: If not you, who will? But by concluding the historical interlude—which comprises, in a manner of speaking, the “appearances” of the poem itself—the realization frees both the mirror and the reader to return to the greater issue: how to live. The final third of “Mirror” recapitulates a familiar sequence of experiences. Of course the answer involves a transformation. The children have, in effect, turned the window into a mirror by their attitude, which frames the scene into a landscape, and in this section the mirror literally sheds its identity and becomes a window. But I think, too, that the final lines of the poem bring us back to the notion of dedication, a commitment that opens and closes The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace and animates it throughout. It starts with a swoon. The old order is disturbed. The mirror sinks to the pitch of a negative sublime:

Since then, as if a fish
Had broken the perfect silver of my reflectiveness,
I have lapses. I suspect
Looks from behind, where nothing is, cool gazes
Through the blind flaws of my mind. As days,
As decades lengthen, this vision
Spreads and blackens.

In seeking to account for this new and threatening vision, the mirror utters the lines that give this poem its eerie power:

I do not know whose it is,
But I think it watches for my last silver
To blister, flake, float leaf by life, each
milling-
Downward dumb conceit, to a standstill
From which not even you strike any brilliant
Chord in me, and to a faceless will,
Echo of mine, I am amenable.

These are tricky lines. The mirror begins tentatively. And the painful process of blistering so turns on the possibilities inherent in language (“leaf by life”) that the change seems a transformation, even a reincarnation. The mirror's once brilliant chords lose, with a Stevensian flourish, “each milling- / Downward dumb conceit.” “In the Hall of Mirrors” trades its silver for untraced frost, or pristine contingency. Here, the dumb conceits or ineffectual tropes yield to a higher power, “a faceless will, / Echo of mine.” Does this imply a rejection of narcissism—the mirror's reflecting pool of self-regard giving way to sweet Echo “that liv'st unseen / Within thy airy shell”? Or is the faceless will the tall transparence of life itself to which the poet declares himself amenable—open, responsive, dedicated? Both perhaps. It is the self and—“Echo of mine”—more than the self these lines declare, accepting determinism and exaltation, experience and language.

It is characteristic of Merrill—in this poem, and in his later, more accomplished poems—to work not with a set of opposites but with a series of dissolves. In “Mirror,” for instance, there is a continual exchange of perspectives, both literal and figurative. Even within the confines of a monologue, the reader is invited to watch the poem's subject through a constantly shifting framework: now mirror, now window, now picture-frame; figure to ground, contour to color, threshold to aftermath; the white oblong of the page outlining the black block of print that is the poem itself. Counterpointing these rapid, at times simultaneous variations of perspective is the slower, more decisive alternation of daybright and nightblind states of mind. The poem twice grows dark, twice moves from ferment to standstill, from perfect silver to blind flaw, from conscious order to the static chaos of the unconscious. The grasping, wide open world at the start of the poem sinks “Late one sleepless / Midsummer night” to a strained, dreamy impulse to cease, as it were, upon that midnight. At the end of the poem, the mirror again yields; the brilliant silver flakes to a blackness the mirror takes as blankness. A “faceless will” here replaces the commanding female figure in the first encounter. It is more menacing and abstract because internal—or rather, internalized. The mirror's powers of reflection are overthrown from within, and become in the end a black pane—a transfiguration of the primary pain that has suffused the poem, from the questioning looks at the start, to Heater's unhappiness and the smoking tapers. The mirror, then, amenable to this process, is another of the figures of the artist in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace. This poem ends where the book's title-poem ends: in “that starry land / Under the world, which no one sees / Without a death.”