[Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, Lowell is among the most highly respected American poets of his generation as well as an acclaimed translator, playwright, and critic. Below, he presents a mixed assessment of Merton's verse.]

Thomas Merton's career has been varied and spectacular: Cambridge University, the New Yorker and the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani. One can understand only too easily why the Protean Mr. Laughlin of the New Directions Press would be fascinated. I am sure that Catholics altogether like the idea of an "experimental" Trappist. But American Catholic culture is in a relatively receptive state of transition; in the arts, as in other things, we are taking our cue from France. Unfortunately, Merton's work has attracted almost no attentive criticism; the poet would appear to be more phenomenal than the poetry.

There is some justice in this neglect. Merton is a modest, not altogether satisfactory minor writer. But he is also, also, as far as my experience goes, easily the most promising of our American Catholic poets and, possibly, the most consequential Catholic poet to write in English since the death of Francis Thompson. Why the last forty years of the Catholic literary revival, which have seen the prose of Chesterton, Dawson and Waugh, have produced nothing as lasting as the light verses of Belloc is no doubt due to complex, partially intangible, causes. We must take what comes. What Merton writes is his own, subtle and intense. So small and genuine an achievement is worth consideration.

The purpose of this review is to point up what Merton has done; this involves an analysis of his limitations and faults. I shall quote to the extent of making a short anthology and hope that each quotation will be read over until it is understood. My comments are more or less footnotes.

       Through every precinct of the wintry city
       Squadroned iron resounds upon the streets;
       Herod's police
       Make shudder the dark steps of the tenements
       At the business about to be done.
 
       Neither look back upon Thy starry country
       Nor hear what rumors crowd across the dark
       While blood runs down those holy walls,
       Nor frame a childish blessing with Thy hand
       Towards that fiery spiral of exulting souls!
 
      Go, Child of God, upon the singing desert,
       Where, with eyes of flame,
       The roaming lion keeps Thy road from harm.
                    ("The Flight into Egypt")

This is modern and traditional, graceful and quietly powerful. The first ten lines are probably the finest in the entire book. Note especially the stern imagery and rhetorical éclat of the first stanza; the subtle shift of rhythm in the second stanza, and the unity of symbol, meaning and sound in line 10. About the last three lines I am less certain. Too much depends on the word singing (presumably, the poet means that the desert is simple and alive, in contrast to the tortured, twisted fury of the town) which prepares for the sinless flame of the lion.

       Because my will is simple as a window
       And knows no pride of original earth,
       It is my life to die, like glass, by light;
       Slain in the strong rays of the bridegroom son….
 
      For light, my lover, steals my life in secret.
       I vanish into day, and leave no shadow
       But the geometry of my cross,
       Whose frame and structure are the strength
       By which I die….
 
      Because I die by brightness and the Holy Spirit
       The Sun rejoices in your jail, my kneeling Christian….
    ("The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a Window")

At first glance this is merely a tour-de-force, in imitation of Donne's "Of My Name in the Window." Then one realizes how persistently and honestly the conceit has been elaborated, how right the tone is for Our Lady. The figure of the window-frame and its shadow is almost as good as its original. Donne's and Crashaw's contributions to the poem detract nothing from its sincerity and freshness. The extracts that I have quoted should have been the entire poem, for the rest, in spite of much incidental brilliance, is repetitive, loose, wordy.

One of Merton's faults is a contrivance that he may have learned from some of the less successful poems of Crashaw (e. g., "The Weeper"), the atomic conceit: each conceit is an entity and the whole poem is seldom much more than the sum of its parts, often it is considerably less. My quotations should have made it plain that Merton is not writing a seventeenth century pastiche; he is using the old devices as an artist, not as an antiquarian. At the same time he follows so closely on the heals of his predecessors that the capacity of his vision is narrowed. Much of the old immediacy, power and mass are lost. In fact, Merton's poems, like Christina Rosetti's, are precariously unlocated in time or place. Nor is this much helped by a trick that he may have gotten from Edith Sitwell or Cummings, that is, using a sound word where one would expect a light word. Occasionally this yields most effective lines, as in a Crucifixion poem which opens with: "When Romans gambled in the clash of lancelight." (Lancelight is an alliterative, Hopkinsian compound that works; however, the last line of the same poem is ruined by Hopkins: "Reeks of the death-thirst man-life found in the forbidden apple.") Elsewhere, as in the singing desert of my first quotation, a mannerism is made to bear the burden of inspiration.

"Flight Into Egypt" is in Merton's most original style; "A Window" is more derivative but hardly inferior. There is a third Merton who is glib, sentimental and romantic.

       When My kind Father, kinder than the sun,
       With looks and smiles bends down
       And utters my bodily life,
       My flesh obeying, praises Heaven like a smiling cloud.
       Then I am the gay wheatfields, the serious hills:
       I fill the sky with words of light, and My incarnate songs
       Fly in and out the branches of My childish voice
       Like thrushes in a tree.
          ("The Holy Child's Song")

These lines are clearly superior to Kilmer's unwittingly obscene "Tree," but thinness is not disguised by one or two apt words and an ordered irregularity of meter. A lofty subject and enthusiastic imagery are often imaginative narcotics.

A variation on the style of "The Flight Into Egypt" appears in the nature poems:

       When cold November sits among the reeds like an
       unlucky fisher
       And ducks drum up as sudden as the wind
       Out of the rushy river,
       We slowly come, robbed of our rod and gun,
       Walking amid the stricken cages of the trees.

This is charming and the details are solid as the details of "The Holy Child's Song" should have been solid. Unfortunately here, as in most of the other nature poems, the fine opening is undeveloped. Instead the cages flounder on into an impossible devotional metaphor, upholstered with keys, jails and jailers.

       Sweet brother, if I do not sleep
       My eyes are flowers for your tomb;
       And if I cannot eat my bread,
       My fasts shall live like willows where you died.
       If in the heat I find no water for my thirst,
       My thirst shall turn to springs for you, poor traveller.
 
       Where, in what desolate and smoky country
       Lies your poor body, lost and dead?
       And in what landscape of disaster
       Has your unhappy spirit lost its road?
       Come, in my labor find a resting place
       And in my sorrows lay your head;
       Or rather take my life and blood
       And buy yourself a better bed—
       Or take my breath and take my death
       And buy yourself a better rest.
 
       When all the men of war are shot
       And flags are fallen into dust,
       Your cross and mine shall tell men still
       Christ died on each, for both of us.
 
       For in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain
       And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring:
       The money of whose tears shall fall
       Into your weak and friendless hand,
       And buy you back to your own land:
       The silence of Whose tears shall fall
       Like bells upon your alien tomb.
       Hear them and come: they call you home.
   ("For My Brother Reported Missing in Action, 1943")

To appreciate how this string of commonplace figures constantly keeps shifting and moving and never becomes insincere, extravagant or dead, the reader should have tried his luck with epitaphs and have failed—have failed and thought he succeeded. Comparison should be made with Crashaw's verses on "A Man and His Wife Who Were Buried Together." There the metaphors are worked out with logic and care and the meter is much firmer; but Merton's poem has its own virtues and is not overshadowed.

Robert Lowell, "The Verses of Thomas Merton," in The Commonweal, Vol. XLII, No. 10, June 22, 1945, pp. 240-42.