Then Sky alone is left, a hundred blue
Fragments in revolution, with no clue
To where a Niche will open. Quite a task,
Putting together Heaven, yet we do.

—“Lost in Translation”

I have received from whom I do not know
These letters. Show me, light, if they make sense.

—“From the Cupola”

I

The Changing Light at Sandover is Merrill's grandest achievement. Into its more than five hundred pages has gone everything he knows about writing poetry, everything he believes about living among other people in the world, all his deepest-held values, fears, convictions, and prejudices, spread among passages of “revelation” spelled out on a Ouija board. Not everyone will wish, or know how, to approach that sort of book, and not everyone who approaches will feel welcome; the material takes getting used to. But many readers may well feel they have been waiting for this trilogy all their lives.

Beginning about 1955, when Merrill and his friend and lover David Jackson first moved to Stonington, they often diverted themselves with a Ouija board—a commercially manufactured one at first, later a larger one homemade from cardboard. A Ouija board, as described in The Seraglio (where Francis Tanning grew addicted to the use of one) is “a smooth wooden board on which had been printed the alphabet, the Arabic numerals, and the words yes and no. At the top was the likeness of a female face, Oriental in spirit, lit from beneath: she peered down into a crystal ball wherein misty letters had materialized.” The board is used to get in touch with the “spirit world”; the mortals below ask questions, the spirits reply by spelling out messages with a pointer on which each player allows the fingers of one hand to rest lightly. (Instead of the planchette that comes with a bought board, Merrill and Jackson preferred the handle of an inverted teacup.)

Some pairs of players, without consciously controlling the pointer, get very much livelier results than others do; and for a time JM and DJ (in the board's shorthand) made a regular parlor game of their extraordinary ability to summon the souls of the dead. Both the temporarily and permanently dead—for they were instructed in the rudiments of a cosmology whereby souls are reborn until advanced enough to embark upon the nine Stages of heavenly progression. The two grew ever more fascinated with the phenomenon; as to what it meant they remained in the dark. But the game had its disquieting, not to say sinister, aspects. Where in fact were these messages coming from? Should the whole affair have become so seductive that for a time DJ and JM found themselves living more within the spirit world than in their own? A poem in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, “Voices from the Other World” (written in 1955), describes how, finally, they began to call upon the spirits less often “Because, once looked at lit / By the cold reflections of the dead … / Our lives had never seemed more full, more real. … ” But the board continued to play a background role in their lives, and eventually the substance of twenty years' irregular conversation with one favorite voice became the basis of “The Book of a Thousand and One Evenings Spent / With David Jackson at the Ouija Board / In Touch with Ephraim Our Familiar Spirit.”

The Book of Ephraim appeared as the greater part of Divine Comedies, in 1976. Mirabell followed in 1978 and Scripts for the Pageant in 1980; these three Books, plus a Coda, make up the trilogy published in one volume in 1982 under the collective title The Changing Light at Sandover. Ephraim covers the decades between 1955 and 1974. The second and third Books and the Coda document another obsessive involvement with the board lasting roughly from June 1976 into late 1978, and need to be considered separately from Ephraim for several reasons. Not reasons of style: the entire trilogy displays the same wit, formal skills, economy, and lyric power as the very best of Merrill's previous work. Nor of overt theme: all were originally undertaken as a warning against nuclear disaster. But Ephraim was composed and published, in Divine Comedies, with no thought of anything to follow. In manner of composition it resembles the shorter narrative poems of that volume multiplied by ten or twelve. The varied experiences with the Ouija world have been thoroughly interpenetrated in Ephraim with the rich whole of the poet's life, and with the sea-changes of twenty years' unconscious ripening, to emerge in “timeskip and gadabout” form as a lengthier counterpart of “Lost in Translation” or “Chimes for Yahya.” Time, and the material, had even allowed for a certain amount of manipulation and invention, improvements for the poem's sake on the literal truth.

Mirabell and Scripts, and the Coda, were composed very differently. A routine chat with the spirits, after Ephraim's book had been completed, was abruptly intruded upon one day by dread powers bringing JM a daunting new assignment: “unheedful one 3 of your years more we want we must have poems of science the weork finisht is but a prologue.” Having impulsively accepted this charge, Merrill then found himself obliged to give up enormous amounts of time—his own and David Jackson's—to daily sessions of transcribing dictation at the board, struggling to make sense of it, and later tossing the messages lightly with details from his and DJ's ongoing lives as he drafted the poems of science he had been commissioned to create. The result is that while Ephraim reads like the rest of Merrill's work only more so, the other two Books progress by fairly (Mirabell) or rigidly (Scripts) chronological schemes to set forth material Merrill has not himself consciously chosen: a bizarre creation myth involving, among other things, Atlantan centaurs and huge radioactive bats which are at once both “life-size” earthly creatures and subatomic particles; four angels who conduct a seminar; and much gossip, often licentious, about the famous dead.

Though the assignment absorbs and enthralls the two mediums in time, Jackson initially reacts to it with fear and Merrill with dismay (“Poems of science? Ugh.”). The poet makes an effort, a successful one, to talk himself round:

Not for nothing had the Impressionists
Put subject-matter in its place, a mere
Pretext for iridescent atmosphere.
Why couldn't Science, in the long run, serve
As well as one's uncleared lunch-table or
Mme X en Culotte de Matador?

This is no new line of thought for Merrill, who had always liked opera's emphasis on sound over sense, and that of French art songs, and who quotes Andrew Marvell in Scripts (from Heaven) as saying “the line! let it run taut & flexible / between the two poles of rhythm and rhyme / & what you hang on it may be as dull / or as provocative as laundry.” But the argument had always served his ends before—that is, he could cite it when he wanted to safeguard a subject with lyrical obscurity. Nowhere does Mirabell sound merely dutiful in the writing, but parts—the bat's numerology, above all—are plainly thrust upon a reluctant poet whose choice of material when writing Ephraim had been free. And both Mirabell and Scripts tax the mediums with doctrine that—at least at first—offends them: the No Accident clause, the elitism clause, the prophecy of a “thinning” to come. Two shades—W. H. Auden and Maria Mitsotáki—are permitted to assist in their instruction, which makes the project more appealing, and much of their resistance eventually evaporates. Still, when Auden blandly urges Merrill “on with the work! thrilling for you jm,” the younger poet retorts:

And maddening—it's all by someone else!
In your voice, Wystan, or in Mirabell's.
I want it mine, but cannot spare those twenty
Years in a cool dark place that Ephraim
took
In order to be palatable wine.
This book by contrast, immature, supine,
Still kicks against its archetypal cradle …
I'd set
My whole heart, after Ephraim, on
returning
To private life, to my own words. Instead,
Here I go again, a vehicle
In this cosmic carpool. Mirabell once said
He taps my word banks. I'd be happier
If I were tapping them. Or thought
I were.

But the case is easily overstated. While Ephraim has been shaped at the center of Merrill's singular art and self in some sense that the other two Books were not, these can hardly be said to be all by someone else. The given subject matter determines the direction of the narrative; the daily transcriptions force a structure upon it. But in and about these Lessons is ample room for Merrill to say how he feels about it all, to talk with David, pay calls, travel between Stonington and New York, Athens, California, and one way and another—shocked, alarmed, distressed, overjoyed, stimulated by what comes across the board—to reveal a great deal about his sense of the meanings of his life. Merrill has described “the way the material came” in an interview: “Not through flashes of insight, wordplay, trains of thought” in the ordinary manner of poetic composition (and, overall, of Ephraim), “More like what a friend, or stranger, might say over a telephone. DJ and I never knew until it had been spelled out letter by letter. What I felt about the material became a natural part of the poem, corresponding to those earlier poems written ‘all by myself.’”¹

It was expected that he edit the transcripts, recast the passages to be used into meters assigned to the various speakers, and polish the whole into something that would read smoothly. Sometimes this meant quite a lot of work, sometimes almost none; as DJ describes it:

I was freer to enjoy the whole experience with the dictation than JM was. … great passages of it that I thought were just ravishingly beautiful, Jimmy was seeing as useless to the text, or a little too much of a good thing. And it must have been maddening for him to think that he couldn't, you know, improve upon something that was very nice; sometimes it already fitted into his syllabic scheme.²

But the sense of being driven to the task was unrelenting:

They dictated it. All of the Scripts—it was very much a regimen. … We had to do it—it started in on this cycle talking about time and the series of moon cycles. We had to get this given amount done in them, and we had to come back at this given moment. They were precise about their schedules, as they were about when the poem would be finished, when it would be published, everything.³

Merrill's own sense of how he “Quarried murky blocks / Of revelation” from the transcripts to build the second Book is described early in the third:

Mirabell—by now more
Tower of Babel
Than Pyramid—groans upward, step by step.
I think to make each Book's first word its number
In a different language
(Five is go in Japanese), then stop
Sickened by these blunt stabs at “design.”
Another morning, Michael's very sun
Glows from within the section
I polish, whose deep grain is one with mine.

Of the three Books, Mirabell seems in one way to have been the most difficult to write. As the poet has described it:

With Ephraim, many of the transcripts I had made from Ouija board sessions had vanished, or hadn't been saved. So I mainly used whatever came to hand, except for the high points which I'd copied out over the years into a special notebook. Those years—time itself—did my winnowing for me. With Mirabell it was, to put it mildly, harder. The transcript was enormous. What you see in the poem might be half, or two-fifths, of the original. Most of the cuts were repetitions: things said a second or third time, in new ways often, to make sure we'd understood. Or further, unnecessary illustrations of a point. …

With Scripts, there was no shaping to be done. Except for the minutest changes, and deciding about line-breaks and so forth, the Lessons you see on the page appear just as we took them down. The doggerel at the fêtes, everything. In between the Lessons—our chats with Wystan or Robert [Morse] or Uni [the trilogy's resident unicorn]—I still felt free to pick and choose; but even there, the design of the book just swept me along.⁴

Increasingly the great labor grew compatible, even joyous, till Merrill could acknowledge that while writing Scripts “I woke up day after day beaming with anticipation.”⁵

Though he recoiled from the word, so mammoth a poem could not be managed without “design.” The Ouija board itself provided the basic frame of each Book: one section for every letter of the alphabet in Ephraim, which covers a calendar year; one (with decimal subdivisions) for each number from 0 to 9 in the book of number-happy Mirabell; and a set of Lessons for the three major divisions—yes (ten), & (five), and no (ten)—of Scripts, a fit scheme for that monument to ambiguity, corresponding to the plot's electric plusses and minuses, Whites and Blacks. A proliferation of voices from the Other World made further device imperative if the work were not to become hopelessly confusing. Merrill solved the principal problem (with help from WHA) in Mirabell 79: rough pentameter, “our virtual birthright,” for the human characters living and dead; and for the bats, who think in fourteens, “why not my boy syllabics? let the case/ represent a fall from metrical grace.” Five stresses by fourteen syllables, of course, borrows from the internal yardstick of the dyed-in-the-wool sonneteer. In Scripts a unicorn/centaur speaks a fair imitation of four-stress Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter. Greater powers—God, Nature, the angels—are bound to no metrical pattern and never use rhyme (apart from certain ceremonial occasions, and from Archangel Michael's clumsy couplet-making). Nor do the bats rhyme; but the humans often fall into couplets or stanzas as if for comfort. Tag phrases distingush the many upper-case human voices from one another: “my boys” or “my dears” for Auden, “mes enfants” for Maria, “mes chers” for Ephraim, “lads” (and baby talk) for Robert Morse, only George Cotzias calls DJ “Dave,” and so on. The variations of the effortlessly coalescing and dissolving lyric passages are too numerous to list; and if the middle distance of Mirabell does sometimes display what Helen Vendler tolerantly calls “a sheer willingness to bore,”⁶ the verse of the trilogy's hundreds of pages consistently outdazzles everything critics can think to say about it.

2

As the foregoing should make clear, Mirabell and Scripts are the unforged record of a lived experience; for the nature of their “revelation” Merrill cannot, in the ordinary sense, be held accountable. By the terms of his commission he may—indeed must—paraphrase, condense, question, even criticize, as well as change prose to poetry. But he is not to decide which ideas to keep and which to exclude: is not to censor, embellish, nor in any way distort the sense of the revealed text. Thus restricted, he can take no more responsibility for its nature than John Constable could for the concepts of cow or hundred-year-old oak when he set out to paint the landscapes of East Anglia. Actually, the material revealed was such as to plague JM with skepticism (and DJ with fear) through much of the work. The first transcriptions strike them respectively as preposterous and terrifying; their harmless parlor game has changed character so drastically, in fact, that the question of belief—easily shrugged off in Ephraim—now reasserts itself again and again. To Auden's rhapsodizing in Mirabell 2, Merrill replies in exasperated couplets:

Dear Wystan, very beautiful
all this
Warmed-up Milton, Dante, Genesis?
This great tradition that has come to grief
In volumes by Blavatsky and Gurdjieff?
Von and Torro in their Star Trek capes,
Atlantis, UFO's, God's chosen apes—?
Nobody could transfigure stuff like that
Without first turning down the rheostat
To Allegory, in whose gloom the whole
Horror of Popthink fastens on the soul,
Harder to scrape off than bubblegum. …
I say we very much don't merit
these
Unverifiable epiphanies.

As the experience continues, appalling and ravishing him by turns, Merrill's doubts trouble him less and less, and near the end of Scripts his assent has become all but total:

Beneath my incredulity
All at once is flowing
Joy, the flash of the unbaited hook—
Yes, yes, it fits, it's right, it had to
be!
Intuition weightless and ongoing
Like stanzas in a book
Or golden scales in the melodic brook—

Readers, of course, may more easily believe in Merrill's riveting experience than in the divine authenticity of its source, or the truth of its prophecy. “For me,” Merrill has said himself (of Mirabell), “the talk and the tone—along with the elements of plot—are the candy coating. The pill itself”—the poem's apocalyptic message, its insistence on determinism and elitism—“is another matter. The reader who can't swallow it has my full sympathy. I've choked on it again and again.”⁷ His own sense, illustrated by the quotation, of his role of Poet as distinct from his role of Scribe is a distinction readers should bear in mind. Thinking of the two roles as Mind Conscious and Unconscious is one very workable way of reading the poem—as if all of The Changing Light at Sandover were an inexhaustibly elaborate dialogue between Merrill's waking intelligence and its own unconscious sources of feeling, myth, and dream, with David Jackson as essential catalyst (and supplemental unconscious story-trove).

DJ himself reports that, to the engrossed mediums, “Whether all that dictation came out of our collective subconscious or not finally became less and less of real interest. Rather as if a flying saucer were to land on one's front lawn, would one ask, ‘Where's it from?’ as one's first question?”⁸ Readers unable or unwilling to fight clear of this question of source, or the related one “What does it mean?” risk spoiling their initial plunge into the trilogy's elemental weirdness—needlessly, because its Message and its meaning are not the same. Large tracts of Message—Mirabell's mathematical formulas, kernels of concept that refuse to crack, Lessons that often seem pure pretext for extravagant spectacle, parts of the System no sooner grasped at last than made pointless by revision—will certainly frustrate an approach to the poem which is too doggedly literal. The Changing Light at Sandover is, and expects to be read as, an immensely complex Overmetaphor packed more tightly with lesser metaphors within metaphors than a plutonium atom is with atomic particles. It's best to assume that what doesn't seem to make literal sense right away makes dramatic or metaphorical sense, or none that matters intellectually. “make sense of it” Merrill is told and told in Scripts; but why should the sense wanted be merely verbal? As Vendler has noted, “Merrill's primary intuition is that of the absolute ravishment of the senses”⁹—those senses restored to the dead souls only at the highest heavenly Stage, and (in “yes” Lesson 7) identified one by one with the very angels. Musical and visual sense is the sort to look for in a baffling passage, like seeing a very fine operatic adaptation of Dracula sung in a foreign language.

Many years ago, Merrill wrote in “To a Butterfly,” “Goodness, how tired one grows/ Just looking through a prism: / Allegory, symbolism. / I've tried, Lord knows,// To keep from seeing double. … ” Now in Mirabell he addresses the radioactive bats intemperately:

How should you speak? Speak without metaphor.
Help me to drown the double-entry book
I've kept these fifty years. You want from me
Science at last, instead of tapestry—
Then tell round what brass tacks the old silk frays.
Stop trying to have everything both ways.
It's too much to be batwing angels and
Inside the atom, don't you understand?

But truly the bats can speak no other way; “we get an effect of engines being / Gunned in frustration, blasts of sheer exhaust.” (This passage is one of those exceptionally easy to read as an argument between conscious Poet, who thinks he ought not to depend so heavily on metaphor, and unconscious Scribe, who knows himself unalterably addicted to it.) Only toward the end of Scripts does Merrill gratefully allow Auden to persuade him that metaphor-making can itself be a form of freedom, that (as WHA has already asserted, late in Mirabell) “fact is is is fable”:

But if it's all a fable
Involving, oh, the stable and unstable
Particles, mustn't we at last wipe clean
The blackboard of these creatures and their talk,
To render in a hieroglyph of chalk
The formulas they stood for? U my boy
Are the scribe yet why? Why make a joyless
thing
Of it through such reductive reasoning?
Once having turned a flitting shape of black
To Mirabell, we you make time flow back?
Subtract from his obsession with
14
the shining/dimming phases of our queen?
Condemn poor uni to the cyclotron
After the greens u've let him gallop
on?
Dear Wystan, thank you for reminding me
The rock I'm chained to is a cloud; I'm free.

Like the elements of the sonnet form, metaphor is in Merrill's marrowbone. And to speak of it thus returns us full circle to the perceptions that took shape in his Amherst honors thesis and in First Poems: that earliest perception of metaphor as ice, sheeting the black abyss, making pain bearable, and of the thin blue egg-shell of appearance with the tiny dead claw broken through. From that cracked robin's egg to “The whole frail egg-shell” of the Earth “Simply imploding as the monitor's / black fills the vacuum mother n abhors” is but a step thirty years in length.

When it appeared as part of Divine Comedies, The Book of Ephraim had seemed about ready to put masks by, as if Merrill at last had found a way to make his peace symbolically with this world's reality by forswearing the spirit world for good. But Poet has a way of insisting on resolutions to which Scribe has not assented. The oedipal fire supposedly extinguished by Francis Tanning in The Seraglio blazed on, and metaphor has cheerfully persisted in doubling Merrill's vision despite the wish voiced twenty years before Mirabell in “To a Butterfly.” And now, with the publication of From the First Nine and The Changing Light at Sandover, in two volumes, the import of Ephraim has been shifted; we are directed to consider it not as the last and most complex work along one line of development but as the first and simplest on another. It is, of course, both—and ought rightly to be printed last in the first volume as well as first in the second.

Renounce the Other World, spiritual metaphor and twin of this “one we feel is ours, and call the real … ”? Strip the real world, never so loved as now, of her thin gold mask at last? Not if the Powers that decide such matters have anything to say about it—and in fact They have found all this to say.

3

And so the old themes whose conflicts Divine Comedies had seemed to resolve burst forth again, their vigor all restored, in Mirabell and Scripts for the Pageant. Literally, those resolutions were true enough. But some of the themes had shaped Merrill's outlook in profound psychological ways all his life, just as they had been shaped by his life. They are evidently not to be cast off merely because their actualizing source in life is neutralized. Now, though, the scale is grander and the mode transcendent, for none of them—masking and illusion, passion and sexuality, parents, aging, childlessness—need be life-size or earthbound any longer.

The spirits continually reaffirm that there are no appearances in Heaven; they can see JM and DJ in mirrors, and whatever their mortal “representatives” see, but never one another. The meaning of mask in such a realm cannot be literal, yet masking of many kinds, and the pretense of sparkling appearances, are perpetual; should this trilogy ever be adapted for the stage with skill it should play splendidly, but the costume budget would need to be generous beyond dreams. The whole poem is constructed of deceptions-for-a-purpose, successively unveiled as the mediums become able to tolerate what they will hear. Often the purpose is dramatic: quarrels between angels, rehearsed and staged to drive the Lesson home, or two characters finally revealed to be one and the same. Heavenly doctrine gets revised like drafts of a poem; Ephraim makes mistakes corrected by Mirabell, who must be corrected in his turn. The numerous pageants, fêtes, and masques overlay the revelation of “the Black” with imaginary spectacle as the schematic order of instruction overlays the revelation of Chaos—gilt or ice above the void. And much about Heaven remains permanently hidden, unfathomable.

But no secrecy now obtains between these mediums and us; and the sense of their shared life realized here forms a powerful chemical bond between reader and poem, tiding us over the “stretches of flats in the exposition of the mythology.”¹⁰ JM and DJ began together as lovers, and the “fortunate conjunction” (as Ephraim calls their partnership) has withstood the stresses of Athens and Santa Fe. Passion was the keynote of Merrill's life and of his art when he and DJ first got through to Ephraim, or he to them, and continued to be its keynote for another twenty years. But, by the mid-seventies, radical social changes had affected that part of his life at the same time it was being reclaimed by trustier, less violent loves. The Book of Ephraim makes abundantly clear that their familiar shares, and rejoices in, his mediums' homosexuality. No more now of that sickness of self felt in “After the Fire”; nothing of the obsessive “dirt-caked” and “dirty-minded” talk New Mexico had produced. Strato himself is vividly evoked in Ephraim, in terms that recall that “animal nature” passage of “Chimes for Yahya”:

Strato squats within the brilliant zero,
Craning at his bare shoulder where a spot
Burns “like fire” invisible to me.
Thinking what? he studies his fair skin
So smooth, so hairless. …
Strato's qualities
All are virtues back in '64.
Humor that breaks into an easy lope
Of evasion my two poor legs cannot hope
To keep up with. Devotion absolute
Moments on end, till some besetting itch
Galvanizes him, or a stray bitch.
(This being seldom in my line to feel,
I most love those for whom the world is real.)
Shine of light green eyes, enthusiasm
Panting and warm across the kindly chasm.
Also, when I claim a right not written
Into our bond, that bristling snap of fear. …

Some of the funniest lines in Mirabell are “spoken” by Auden's widow Chester Kallman, who complains about how Auden treats him in Heaven, about a fickle heavenly lover, about the life in Johannesburg into which he is about to be reborn—all in a style suggesting that the subject of homosexuality and the gay world, off the leash at last, went slightly mad with unconfinement:

But you're coming back,
It's too exciting! Please to see my black
Face in a glass darkly? I wont be
white wont be a poet wont be queer
Can u conceive of life without those 3???
Well, frankly, yes. the more fool u my dear
You shock us, Chester. After months of idle,
Useless isolation— All i hear
Are these b minor hymns to usefulness:
Little Miss Bonami ooh so glad
to find arcadia in a brillo pad!
laugh clone laugh ah life i feel the lash
of the new master nothing now but crash
courses What does Wystan say? To Plato?
Having dropped me like a hot o shit
What good is rhyme now

Extended passages like this one enliven Mirabell and Scripts, and the trilogy is liberally salted thoughout with witty camp chit-chat. Willing at last to exploit this source, Merrill has drawn upon it with a free hand.

But the subject of proclivity is not only a rich new well-spring of comedy; the long-stoppered avowal will swell and swell, and grant a still more deeply seated wish. “Why,” wonders DJ early in the Mirabell Lessons, “did They choose us? / Are we more usable than Yeats or Hugo, / Doters on women … ” An explanation ensues:

Love of one man for another or love
between women
is a new development of the past 4000 years
encouraging such mind values as produce the
blossoms
of poetry & music, those 2 principal lights
of
god biology. Lesser arts needed no exegetes:
architecture sculpture the mosaics & paintings
that
Flowered in greece & persia celebrated
the body.
Poetry music song indwell & celebrate
the mind …
heart if u will. …
Now mind in its pure form is a nonsexual passion
or a unisexual one producing only light.
Few painters or sculptors can enter this life
of the mind.
They (like all so-called normal lovers) must
produce at last
bodies they do not exist for any other purpose

“Come now,” the mediums demur, “admit that certain very great/Poets and musicians have been straight.” Self-despising homosexual behavior was displaced onto Panayioti in “After the Fire” and onto the Enfant Chic in The (Diblos) Notebook; in like manner this unblushing speech issues from Mirabell's mouth—or beak; Mirabell has turned, the instant before he makes it, from a bat named 741 into a peacock, in a kind of coming-out party of his own. The doctrine of homosexuals as evolution's crème-de-la-crème transforms the childlessness that once grieved JM into a trade-off beneficial, even essential, to his poetry. It also accounts for the gay-subculture ambience created in this poem by so much camp talk, and makes sense of a circumstance which would otherwise seem decidedly peculiar: that once they reach the formallesson stage, nearly all the poem's significant characters are male and gay. (The one who appears to be neither will ultimately reveal herself as both.) Two straight men added to the cast of Scripts are friends who died with Mirabell half-written and the “yes” dictations of Scripts completed; the poem fits them to a scheme whose shape is already fixed. Which cannot prevent JM from feeling, as he knows his readers must, that

A sense comes late in life of too much death,
Of standing wordless, with head bowed beneath
The buffeting of losses which we see
At once, no matter how reluctantly,
As gains. Gains to the work. Ill-gotten gains …
Well, Robert, we'll make room. Your elegy
Can go in Mirabell, Book 8, to be
Written during the hot weeks ahead;
Its only fiction, that you're not yet dead.

The dead souls most important to the entire poem are two: W. H. Auden, and Maria Mitsotáki, an Athens friend who was the subject of a Fire Screen poem, “Words for Maria.” JM's peace with his own mother has been ratified. His father died in 1956. The death of DJ's aged parents is the first major event of Mirabell; indeed, these impending deaths are what send them back to the Ouija board after an absence of more than a year (“As things were, / Where else to look for sense, comfort, and wit?”). Helen Vendler, wise in this as in much else, writes:

In the usual biological cycle, parents die after their children have become parents; the internalizing of the parental role, it is believed, enables the parents to be absorbed into the filial psyche. In the childless world of Mirabell, the disappearance of parents, or parental friends, is the disappearance of the parental and therefore of the filial; JM and DJ can no longer be “boys” but must put on the mortality of the survivor.¹¹

Both childless like the mediums in (this) life, WHA and MM make idealized parent-figures, their two-sided humanity masked beyond the kindly chasm of death. As Merrill has said in an interview, “In life, there are no perfect affections. … Yet, once dead, overnight the shrewish wife becomes ‘a saint,’ frustrations vanish at cockcrow, and from the once fallible human mouth come words of blessed reassurance. … Given the power … would I bring any of these figures back to earth?”¹² Vendler amplifies: Auden and Maria “are the people who call JM and DJ ‘mes enfants’ (Maria, known as ‘Maman’) or ‘my boys’ (Auden). When these voices fall silent, there will be no one to whom the poet is a child.”¹³ A (twinned) only child: Maria, we learn in Mirabell, “Was hailed on arrival by “hordes of polyglot / selfstyled enfants … but now a decent / veil is drawn & I HAVE NONE BUT U.”

These voices, even these, fall silent at poem's end—but only after the parents' and children's love has been perfected, like that of Dante and Beatrice, by its three-year ceremony of guidance, enlightenment, and farewell. Beyond this silence gleams the tantalizing hope of a rendezvous with Maria in 1991, Bombay, The World. And as the surrogate parents move inexorably toward their departures, behind them grow and fill out the personified figures of Mother Nature and God/Sultan Biology: all-powerful and capriciously destructive, even murderous, on the one hand, heartbreakingly loveable on the other, like parents as perceived by small children. By the terms of the myth, their “divorce” would destroy their third, last, human child and his green world; and the poet, struck by parallels between the broken home he grew up in and the present situation of all humanity, angry and afraid as no child of divorced parents is ever too old to be, evokes himself when young once more. “Between an often absent or abstracted/ (In mid-depression) father and still young / Mother's wronged air of commonsense the child sat,” he writes, and goes on to build the metaphor, cosmic by domestic detail, which will culminate in Earth-shattering divorce. “That was the summer my par—yr parallels / diverge precisely here,” insists Maria. “hush enfant for no man's mind can reach / beyond that him & her their separation / remains unthinkable.” JM, if not entirely convinced, is convinced at least that Maria is right to stop this probing, terrifying line of thought. “Barbarity,” he agrees, pulling himself together, “To serve uncooked one's bloody tranche de vie … / Later, if the hero couldn't smile, / Reader and author could; one called it style.” Or called it metaphor, ever and always at work to make any new form of the oldest, most chronic pain bearable.

4

The Prophetic Books of William Blake and the Vision of Yeats come tentatively to mind when one considers all this, for The Changing Light at Sandover is a masterwork of great eccentricity. Unlike Dante's Comedy or Paradise Lost, those other major poems which purport to address man's role in the universal scheme, the value “system” given poetic expression here is not shared by an entire culture. Unlike them, it is not a morality tale. It substitutes yes-and-no ambiguities for moral absolutes. Sin is equated with the giving and receiving of pain, evil and good recognized on the cosmic level alone, outside the power of individual human beings (in a wholly deterministic universe) to choose, or to enact unless “cloned” to do so. Personal salvation then cannot be at issue; the issue is global survival. The poem accounts for the chief obstacles to survival—overpopulation and nuclear holocaust—in original ways, but does not propose, in the manner of science fiction, original ways of implementing the obvious solutions. Certain virtues—kindness, courtesy, devotion, affection, modesty, tolerance, tact, patience, plus intelligence, talent, and wit—are celebrated, many of these broadly shared with western religions; yet the values they embody are, lacking spiritual principles to back them up, social rather than spiritual values. (“language,” says WHA, “is the poet's church.”) Neither deep religious sensibility, nor political savvy, nor philosophical inquiringness are at work in Merrill's poem, setting it off sharply in tone from Dante's and from Milton's.

The chief difficulty in viewing the trilogy as western religious myth is its insistence that innate class, on Earth as in Heaven, determines who can take steps to prevent the world from blowing up. Only elect “Lab souls” of sufficient “densities,” preprogrammed or cloned in Heaven between lives, can do God's work on Earth to build an earthly Paradise; only they will read this poem's Message with comprehension:

A mere 2 million cloned souls listen to each other while outside they howl & prance so recently out of the trees. & So for u the hardest rule: the rule of the rulers. Politicians have led man down a road where he believes all is for all this is the fool's paradise all will be for all only when all is understood.

The absolute amount of “human soul densities” is finite, and has had to be pieced out in recent history with “animal densities” of dog and rat to cope with the glut of children. Holocaust is a present danger precisely because power has fallen into the hands of leaders with a high proportion of animal soul densities—“Rat souls”—who too easily lose control of their high-spirited but destructive impulses. And lately, therefore, accidents—slippages in the works—have infiltrated the realm of no accident. To restore balance, save the earth from utter destruction, and bring Paradise upon it, a thinning of the population is essential.

If the positive and negative charge within the atom is a metaphor for this global drama, the drama is in turn a metaphor for something vaster. The cosmic conflict of Good, or White, forces represented by God Biology—Earth is, so to speak, his representative, he Earth's patron, in a Galactic Pantheon—are at war with horrific forces called simply “the Black” (as in black holes), whose nature is utter nothingness: “The Black beyond black, past that eerie Wall—/ past matter black of thought unthinkable,” elsewhere defined as “atomic black / compressed from time's reversibility,” a phrase which resists conceptualization. Michael identifies it “in man's life” with “the dullwitted, the mob, the idiot in power, the purely blank of mind”; perhaps these make time flow backward by reversing the evolutionary ascent of life through time toward the development of an ever larger, more convoluted brain. On his second visit Michael had stated resoundingly, “intelligence, that is the source of light. fear nothing when you stand in it.” It follows that when the idiot rules you stand in darkness, and are afraid.

“Time's reversibility” remains a conundrum; but forward-flowing time is easy to see as Black in the context of Merrill's earlier work. “Why should Time be black?” he asks, having answered his own question through thirty years of poems wherein Time is the agent of aging, and of steadily diminishing beauty and passional capacity, and the destroyer of kindly masks and illusions. When Paradise comes upon Earth “then time will stop”: man will be immortal.

The poem's cryptic Message, however, is not identical with its meaning, as readers with any density of soul at all can see. Part of its meaning is its wit and style. The rest lies where the most meaning has always lain in Merrill's work: in the loves between human characters in life and beyond death, and in their losses; and especially in the evocation of twenty-five domestic years with David Jackson, which Thom Gunn has called “the most convincing description I know of a gay marriage”:

The men's life together is presented to us in detail which is almost causal: we see them choosing wallpaper, keeping house, traveling, entertaining, and above all sitting at the Ouija board. It is not a minor triumph and it is not an incidental one because, after all, it is the two of them in their closeness who have evoked the whole spirit world of Ephraim and Mirabell [and Scripts], or perhaps even created it.¹⁴

Those “genre” glimpses of JM and DJ watering on the terrace, discussing the sense of a knotty transcript, going about their days together while not collaborating across the Board, are the most affecting, most authentic part of the entire story unstifled here, and the most human. Have they created the Other World, in its infinite richness and strangeness, between them? The Book of Ephraim includes an explanation suggested by JM's former psychiatrist: “what you and David do / We call folie à deux”—a way of talking to one another from behind the mask of the Ouija board. The ex-shrink leads his ex-patient to speculate that Ephraim is an imaginary offspring produced in lieu of a real one to satisfy the biological urge to procreate, seeing that “Somewhere a Father Figure shakes his rod / At sons who have not sired a child.” The explanation tidily foreshadows Mirabell's: homosexuals, being poorly suited to make children, are well-suited therefore to make poetry. Ephraim—and all that follows where he led—makes sense as the child of JM's and DJ's love and pro/creativity, conceived through their union at the Ouija board.

“Jung says—or if he doesn't, all but does—/That God and the Unconscious are one,” we read in Ephraim, Section U. To theorize that in The Changing Light at Sandover two unconsciouses, linked skillfully by long practice, have played God by creating a cosmic vision still leaves a great deal unexplained. How, for instance, did DJ and JM know that Nabokov was dead—news that reached them first via the Board? More centrally, what is it these two do that others fail to do, which yields such astonishing results? When we leave JM at the close of the Coda, nervously preparing to read the completed trilogy to the heavenly host assembled (one auditor per letter of the alphabet), his situation is both so familiar in its Proustian stance and thematic preoccupations, and so outré in its total concept, as to baffle and defy any simple explanation. Even if the two did make all of it up unconsciously, an experience has befallen them scarcely less amazing and wonderful than if, like the prophets of old, they had heard God's voice address them aloud. And if God and the Unconscious are one—? As Merrill has observed, “if it's still yourself that you're drawing upon, then that self is much stranger and freer and more far-seeing than the one you thought you knew.”¹⁵ Put another way, in another place: “If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.” He adds that his time among the spirits has “made me think twice about the imagination,”¹⁶—a reminder that Section S of Ephraim begins where this essay may properly conclude:

Stevens imagined the imagination
And God as one; the imagination, also,
As that which presses back, in parlous times,
Against “the pressure of reality.”

Notes

1. Vendler, “James Merrill's Myth,” p. 12.

2. J.D. McClatchy, “DJ,” p. 37.

3. McClatchy, “DJ,” p. 35.

4. McClatchy, “The Art of Poetry,” pp. 190-91.

5. Vendler, “James Merrill's Myth,” p. 13.

6. Vendler, Part of Nature, p. 230.

7. Vendler, “James Merrill's Myth,” p. 12.

8. McClatchy, “DJ,” p. 38.

9. Vendler, Part of Nature, p. 227.

10. Ibid., p. 230.

11. Ibid., p. 225.

12. Vendler, “James Merrill's Myth,” p. 12.

13. Vendler, Part of Nature, p. 225.

14. Thom Gunn, “A Heroic Enterprise” [review of Divine Comedies and Mirabell], San Francisco Review of Books (August 1979), p. 4.

15. McClatchy, “The Art of Poetry,” p. 194.

16. Vendler, “James Merrill's Myth,” p. 13.