[An American poet who maintained a friendship with Merton, Lentfoehr is considered an authority on Merton's works. In the following excerpt from her study Words and Silence: On the Poetry of Thomas Merton, she discusses recurring social and religious themes in the poet's work.]

After considering in some detail the several collections of poetry in the Thomas Merton canon (excepting the two last works published in his lifetime, Cables to the Ace, and The Geography of Lograire), it would seem pertinent at this point to cross chronological barriers in order to focus on poems dealing with specific subject matters that occur with a certain frequency.

It is unarguable that, whether overt or not, the ultimate referral point and matrix of all his writings—prose as well as poetry—is basically religious: the binding of man to God. Still, when considering the complete poetry canon, only about a third of the poems might be viewed as having specific religious themes. Among these a goodly number derive their inspiration from the Incarnation, with such events as proliferate from it—the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Passion, and the Eucharist. In the first three the Virgin Mary's role is paramount, and since so many poems cluster around her, or are addressed to her, it seems important to isolate some of them for comment.

"The Blessed Virgin Compared to a Window" appears in Merton's first collection, Thirty Poems (1944), and at once conjures up Gerard Manley Hopkins's "The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe." Both poems elaborate a "metaphysical conceit": Merton's, the metaphor of a window representing the docile, pure soul of Mary through which God can transmit Himself unobstructedly as light through glass, and Hopkins's, the trope comparing her to air surrounding and pervading us by her influence, since she has but "one work to do / Let all God's glory through." Curiously, though Merton had read extensively in Hopkins, and while at Columbia had seriously considered writing a doctoral dissertation on his poetry, he never seems to have been influenced by Hopkins's sprung-rhythm prosody. It is also of interest to note that some ten years later, in a conference given the young monks at the abbey in his capacity of novice-master, Merton gave a careful analysis of the Hopkins poem.

The metaphor of the window is not original with Merton nor with Hopkins. The latter speaks of "glass-blue days" and of "This blue heaven" (Mary) transmitting "The hued sunbeam [Christ] perfect, not altering it." But the meta-phor had earlier sources. While Merton was still at Columbia he became familiar with the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, and purchased a copy of The Ascent of Mount Carmel, which he read assiduously in his Greenwich Village apartment. The book is an extended commentary on a poem concerning the union of the human and divine wills, in which St. John used the comparison of a ray of sunlight striking a window.

Although obviously the nature of the window is distinct from that of the sun's ray (even if the two seem identical), we can assert that the window is the ray of light of the sun by participation.

But the metaphor was in turn borrowed by St. John of the Cross from the Pseudo Areopagite's De Mystica Theologia (Bk. II, Ch. 5).

Merton's poem begins:

       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 sun.

The word "simple" must be taken in its scholastic precisions, as having "no parts outside of parts" (St. Thomas). Merton uses it again in this same specific sense in a poem on St. Thomas Aquinas in which "the black-friar breaks the Truth, his Host, / Among his friends the simple Substances," [A Man in the Divided Sea]. The metaphor of the "bridegroom sun" is obviously from the Canticle of Canticles, a symbolism that appears frequently in spiritual theology. The poem continues:

       Because my love is simple as a window
       And knows no shame of original dust,
       I longed all night, (when I was visible) for dawn my death:
       When I would marry day, my Holy Spirit:
       And die by transsubstantiation into light.

The reference to transsubstantiation and to the lover must again be given their full theological resonances.

Another Marian poem, and one of Merton's finest, is "The Messenger," a pre-Trappist poem first published in Spirit, then reprinted in Thirty Poems, and later in the poetry column of The New York Times Book Review. With Lady-day in its context of spring, the "annunciation imagery" is striking, as the "tongue of March's bugle" warns of "the coming of the warrior sun."

       When spring has garrisoned up her army of water,
       A million grasses leave theír tents, and stand in rows
       To see their invincible brother.
       Mending the winter's ruins with their laughter,
       The flowers go out to their understructive wars.

Then, counseling the flowers to "Walk in the woods and be witnesses, / You, the best of these poor children," Merton moves into the final stanza, which begins the swiftness of Gabriel's descent:

       When Gabriel hit the bright shore of the world,
       Yours were the eyes saw some
       Star-sandalled stranger walk like lightning down the air,
       The morning the Mother of God
       Loved and dreaded the message of the angel.

In the poem "The Oracle," on a quite different theme, its final stanza alludes to Gabriel's swift movement of descent when

       … already, down the far, fast ladders of light
       The stern, astounding angel
       Starts with a truer message,
       Carrying a lily.

And once again in "Aubade—The Annunciation":

       Desires glitter in her mind
       Like morning stars:
 
       Until her name is suddenly spoken
       Like a meteor falling.

A related theme is that of the visitation of Mary to Elizabeth, on which Merton wrote two poems: "The Evening of the Visitation" and "The Quickening of St. John Baptist." In the former he asks nature to participate:

       Still bend your heads like kind and humble kings
       The way you did this golden morning when you saw
            God's Mother passing.

Manuscript versions of "The Quickening of St. John Baptist" present an interesting study in development: the beginnings—two columns of pencil jottings (twenty-four lines) on a folded sheet, in which some of the key lines of the poem already appear, as for instance:

       Her salutation
       Sings in the stone valley like a Charterhouse bell.

Most of the poem is a questioning of St. John Baptist, and is couched in hermit imagery:

                            … small anchorite!
       How did you see her in the eyeless dark?
       .....
       You need no eloquence, wild bairn,
       Exulting in your hermitage,
       Your ecstasy is your apostolate,
       For whom to kick is contemplata tradere.

His vocation is with the Church's "hidden children":

       The speechless Trappist, or the grey, granite Carthusian,
       The quiet Carmelite, the barefoot Clare,
       Planted in the night of contemplation,
       Sealed in the dark and waiting to be born.
       Night is our diocese and silence is our ministry
       Poverty our charity and helplessness our tongue-tied sermon.
       Beyond the scope of sight or sound we dwell upon the air
       Seeking the world's gain in an unthinkable experience.

In the second version of this poem (thirty-five lines), already the first line of the final version appears, "Why do you fly from the drowned shores of Galilee?" In the manuscript of the final version (seventy-one lines) the original title, "A Quickening: A Song for the Visitation," has been given its present title, "The Quickening of St. John Baptist," and dated Feast of St. John Baptist, 1947.

Another poem in the same collection, The Tears of the Blind Lions, "To the Immaculate Virgin, on a Winter Night," though written over twenty years ago, has a special contemporary significance, as Merton speaks of "a day of blood and many beatings"—

       I see the governments rise up, behind the steel horizon,
       And take their weapons and begin to kill.

There is also an allusion to the proximity of Fort Knox: "Out where the soldiers camp the guns begin to thump / And another winter time comes down / To seal your years in ice." The last lines of the poems are especially poignant:

       Lady, the night has got us by the heart
       And the whole world is tumbling down.
       Words turn to ice in my dry throat
       Praying for a land without prayer,
 
       Walking to you on water all winter
       In a year that wants more war.

Another poem, the last with the Virgin Mary as theme, "The Annunciation," was written as a billet for the nuns of the New York Carmel and is in Merton's new manner, more free of elaboration, and in this instance somewhat reminiscent of a pre-Raphaelite painting:

       The girl prays by the bare wall
       Between the lamp and the chair.
       (Framed with an angel in our galleries
       She has a richer painted room, sometimes a crown.
       But seven pillars of obscurity
       Build her to Wisdom's house, and Ark, and Tower.
       She owns their manna in her jar.)
 
       Fifteen years old—
       The flowers printed on her dress
       Cease moving in the middle of her prayer
       When God, Who sends the messenger,
       Meets his messenger in her heart.
       Her answer, between breath and breath,
       Wrings from her innocence our Sacrament!
       In her white body God becomes our Bread.

These poems form an easy transition to the theme of the Nativity, in which one is aware of the sensitivity, gentleness, and joy of their author's spirit in presence of this mystery, as in "The Holy Child's Song":

       When midnight occupied the porches of the Poet's reason
       Sweeter than any bird
       He heard the Holy Child.

In a type of envelope style, rarely used by Merton, the above three lines are used again as a refrain at the poem's end, enclosing the child's songs as they "Fly in and out the branches of my childish voice / Like thrushes in a tree."

       And when my Mother, pretty as a church,
       Takes me upon her lap, I laugh with love,
       Loving to live in her flesh, which is my house….

In these poems nature is frequently used as setting—the winter season, and the animals, as the child continues his song:

       In winter when the birds put down their flutes
       And wind plays sharper than a fife upon the icy rain,
       I sit in this crib,
       And laugh like fire, and clap My golden hands:
       To view my friends the timid beasts—
       Their great brown flanks, muzzles and milky breath!

In the poem "Advent," in metaphor we find the animals again: "minds, meek as beasts, / Stay close at home in the sweet hay; / And intellects are quieter than the flocks that feed by starlight." The moon and skies are invoked to "pour down your darkness and your brightness over all our solemn valleys." In "Carol":

       God's glory, now, is kindled gentler than low candlelight
       Under the rafters of a barn:
       Eternal Peace is sleeping in the hay,
       And Wisdom's born in secret in a straw-roofed stable.

In "The Fall of Night," the farmers coming home from the fields sing:

       We bring these heavy wagons full of hay to make your bed,
       O Mercy, born between the animals.

Finally, in the poem "A Christmas Card," Merton paints a winter canvas as

       … one by one the shepherds, with their snowy feet,
       Stamp and shake out their hats upon the stable dirt,
       And one by one kneel down to look upon their Life.

Another frequent theme is that of children, to whom Merton often alludes, especially in his early poems. It has been said that in every poet there is a child, since in some fashion he invariably retains a child's vision. Merton is no exception, and with this vision has come an empathy with children that characterizes some of his most sensitive poems. In "The Winter's Night," when "the frost cracks on the window,"

       One says the moonlight grated like a skate
       Across the freezing winter.
       Another hears the starlight breaking like a knife-blade
       Upon the silent, steelbright pond….
       Yet it is far from Christmas, when a star
       Sang in the pane, as brittle as their innocence….
       The moonlight rings upon the ice as sudden as a footstep;
       Starlight clinks upon the dooryard stone, too like a latch,
       And the children are, again, awake,
       And all call out in whispers to their guardian angels.

In "Aubade: Lake Erie," after the sun "light handed" has sown "this Indian water / With a crop of cockles," Merton calls to the children:

       Awake, in the frames of windows, innocent children,
       Loving the blue, sprayed leaves of childish life,
       Applaud the bearded corn, the bleeding grape,
       And cry:
       "Here is the hay-colored sun, our marvelous cousin,
       Walking in the barley."

Again in "Evening" is the childrens' interpretation of nature:

       They say the sky is made of glass,
       They say the smiling moon's a bride.
       ....
       They name the new come planets
       With words that flower
       On little voices, light as stems of lilies.

As Merton celebrated the candor and innocence of children, so too he was most vulnerable to their suffering. In an early poem, "Aubade: Harlem," "in the sterile jungles of waterpipes and ladders," he pictures a typical scene, one known to him firsthand, since before he entered the monastery he had spent many hours working in Harlem at Friendship House. The beginning and final stanza of the poem are the same, as we see.

      Across the cages of the keyless aviaries,
       The lines and wires, the gallows of the broken kites,
       Crucify, against the fearful light,
       The ragged dresses of the little children.

One of the most interesting of Merton's poems on children is "Grace's House," written in 1962 and inspired by a four-year-old child's pencil drawing of a house on a hill. With meticulous exactitude Merton details each object of the sketch—"No blade of grass is not counted, / No blade of grass forgotten on this hill." He details the house on the summit; a snow cloud rolling from the chimney; flowers; curtains, "Not for hiding, but for seeing out"; trees, from which animals peek out; a dog, "his foreleg curled, his eye like an aster"; a mailbox "full of Valentines for Grace".

       There is a name on the box, name of a family
       Not yet ready to be written in language.

In the second stanza appears the theme around which all resonances cluster, as Merton fastens on an apparently insignificant detail which nonetheless provides the leitmotif of the poem, namely:

       There is no path to the summit—
       No path drawn
       To Grace's house.

—which provides the contrast between our world and hers, "our Coney Island," and her "green sun-hill",

       Between our world and hers
       Runs a sweet river
       (No, it is not the road
       It is the uncrossed crystal
       Water between our ignorance and her truth.)

The poem's last line re-introduces the theme, as Merton casually mentions "a rabbit / And two birds"—

       … bathing in the stream
       which is no road, because
 
      Alas, there is no road to Grace's house!

Interestingly, the German edition of Merton's Selected Poems is titled Gracias Haus, and the poem is first of the thirty-eight which comprise the selection. On sending a copy of this edition to a friend he remarked, "I think they did a very nice job. Glad my little Grace made the title!"

At about the same time "Grace's House" was written, a newspaper photograph of a young Chinese refugee, stopped in her flight to Hong Kong and kneeling in tears as she begged to be admitted to the city, loosed in Merton a bitterly ironic poem, "A Picture of Lee Ying," written in a free, almost documentary style, as he mocks the platitudinal excuses offered by the authorities.

       Point of no return is the caption, but this is meaningless she must return that is the story
 
       She would not weep if she had reached a point of no return what she wants is not to return

Merton's irony cuts deep:

       When the authorities are alarmed what can you do
 
     You can return to China
 
     Their alarm is worse than your sorrow

But he tells her not to look at the dark side, for "You have the sympathy of millions." Then the devastatingly paradoxical conclusion:

As a tribute to your sorrow we resolve to spend more money on nuclear weapons there is always a bright side

Merton's mounting concern over the racial question found its expression in another children's poem, one of deep compassion, addressed to Carole Denise McNair, one of the children killed that tragic September of 1963 in Birmingham. The poem is titled "Picture of a Black Child with a White Doll" and is an implicit indictment of a society in which such a crime could happen.

       Your dark eyes will never need to understand
       Our sadness who see you
       Hold that plastic glass-eyed
       Merchandise as if our empty-headed race
       Worthless full of fury
       Twanging and drooling in the southern night
       With guns and phantoms
       Needed to know love.

This is in contrast to the irony that marked another poem, "And the Children of Birmingham," its sharp, objective, matter-of-fact statement set in the framework of a children's story, as it parodies "Little Red Riding Hood," "Grandma's pointed teeth / ('Better to love you with')." The present poem, even as it contrasts the dark child with "That senseless platinum head / Of a hot city cupid," is pervaded by a tenderness that distinguishes its author:

       Next to your live and lovely shade
       Your smile and your person
       Yet that silly manufactured head
       Would soon kill you if it could think….
       So without a thought
       Of death or fear
       Of night
       You glow full of dark red August
       Risen and Christian
       Africa purchased
       For the one lovable Father alone.

And when all was done, "They found you and made you a winner"—

       Even in most senseless cruelty
       Your darkness and childhood
       Became fortune yes became
       Irreversible luck and halo.

Not only to the suffering of children did Merton extend his concern but also to such as were caught up in some tragic circumstance or were victims of the judgment of an unhappy society. One of the most poignant poems Merton wrote, "There Has to Be a Jail for Ladies," is one in which he genuinely compassionates and pleads for the "ladies of the street," when "their beauty is taken from them, when their hearts are broken," while the government wants a jail for them "when they are ugly because they are wrong." He tells them:

       I love you, unhappy ones….
       Tell me, darlings, can God be in Hell?
       You may curse; but he makes your dry voice turn to
       butter….
         He will laugh at judges.
       He will laugh at the jail.
       He will make me write this song.

And the last stanza carries an unforgettable image:

       God will come to your window with skylarks
       And pluck each year like a white rose.

Like the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets whom Merton during his early student years much admired, he too wrote a number of elegies. The first, written for his brother, is well known and often quoted—"For My Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943". A longer poem, "The Trappist Cemetery—Gethsemani," is addressed to his brother monks who lie in the burial ground circling the apse of the abbey church. Paradoxically, the poem is a song of joy rather than of mourning as Merton tells them not to fear that "The birds that bicker in the lonely belfry / Will ever give away your legends," but exhorts them to look and "See, the kind universe / Wheeling in love above the abbey steeple / Lights up your sleepy nursery with stars." In a somewhat effusive metaphor he recounts their lives, then asks that they teach us "how to wear / Silence, our humble armor…. / Because your work is not yet done," and at the last day, when "your graves, Gethsemani, give up their angels,"

       Return them to their souls to learn
       The songs and attitudes of glory.
       Then will creation rise again like gold
       Clean, from the furnace of your litanies:
       The beasts and trees shall share your resurrection,
       And a new world be born from these green tombs.

This poem was recorded for the Harvard Vocarium Series by the British playwright Robert Speaight, and also included in the Selected Poems edited by him in England in 1950.

For "Elegy for the Monastery Barn," which first appeared in The Strange Islands, and later in Mark Van Doren's edition of Merton's Selected Poems (1959 and 1967), Merton furnished us the "poetic occasion," saying [in the preface to The Strange Islands] that it "was written after the cowbarn at Gethsemani burned down, one August evening in 1953, during the evening meditation. The monks left the meditation to fight a very hot fire and the poem arrived about the same time as the fire truck from the nearest town." It received comment by Mark Van Doren in his introduction to Selected Poems, as he had requested to include this poem about which he knew Merton to be somewhat shy. Merton remarked:

As a matter of fact it is for me subjectively an important poem, because when I was a kid in Maryland (yes, even that, for a while) a barn burned down in the middle of the night and it is one of the earliest things I can remember. So burning barns are for me great mysteries that are important. They turn out to be the whole world, and it is the Last Judgement.

In the poem the barn is presented under the image of an old lady who, for her last hour, had dressed herself in "Too gay a dress" and calls to the countryside, "Look, how fast I dress myself in fire!" But for those who worked in her she leaves vivid memories:

       She, in whose airless heart
       We burst our veins to fill her full of hay,
       Now stands apart.
       She will not have us near her. Terribly,
       Sweet Christ, how terribly her beauty burns us now!

But as legacy she has left them her solitude, her peace, her silence. Clustered around the metaphor of the barn is the monks' ignorance of her vanity, hence their surprise at seeing her "So loved, and so attended, and so feared." The "Fifty invisible cattle" return, and the past years as well "Assume their solemn places one by one" for this little minute of their destiny and meaning, as

       Laved in the flame as in a Sacrament
       The brilliant walls are holy
       In their first-last hour of joy.

The last two stanzas of the poem are reminiscent of the liturgy of Easter night relevant to the blessing of the new fire, Lumen Christi, which is later thrice plunged into the baptismal water. In both text and imagery the first line of the final stanza alludes to Luke 21:21, in which, foretelling the destruction of Jerusalem, Christ warns those in Judea to flee to the mountains and those in the city to depart.

       Flee from within the barn! Fly from the silence
       Of this creature sanctified by fire.

The second line touches on the petition "Sanctify this new fire," from the Exultet of the Easter night vigil. Merton continues:

       Let no man stay inside to look upon the Lord!
       Let no man wait within and see the Holy
       One sitting in the presence of disaster
       Thinking upon this barn His gentle doom!

Again there is an allusion to Luke (21:27), where "they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud." The event of the barn fire is still kept in its spiritual dimension as it presents "the Holy / One … / Thinking upon this barn His gentle doom!" It is His barn, since all things are His and He is all things, which recalls a moving passage in William J. Lynch's Christ and Apollo, speaking of the Christic imagination which

begins to assume the order of creation and to lift it into its own vitality. Thus Christ is water, gold, butter, food, a harp, a dove, the day, a house, merchant, fig, gate, stone, book, wood, light, medicine, oil, bread, arrow salt, turtle, risen sun, way, and many things besides.

With its theological resonances and significances this elegy stands out among Merton's finest, as his poetic imagination lifts a simple event—the burning barn—through the zone of the Teilhardian cosmic Christ to that of apocalyptic vision.

Emblems of a Season of Fury contains four elegies. "Song for the Death of Averroës," is a simple narrative in verse prose style, a form Merton was beginning to use in a number of poems, and is adapted from Ibn Al Arabi, after the Spanish version of Asin Palacios. The young man was sent by his father on an errand to his friend Averroës at the latter's request "to learn if it were true that God had spoken to [him] in solitude." Though at first troubled, Averroës afterward rejoiced and praised God,

… who has made us live in this time when there exists one of those endowed with mystical gifts, one able to unlock His door, and praised be He for granting me, in addition, the favor of seeing one such person with my own eyes.

Ibn Al Arabi never saw Averroës again, but attended his funeral in Cordova, and saw his coffin carried on one side of the beast of burden and the books he had written on the other. To a remark of the scholar Benchobair, "No need to point it out, my son, for it is clearly evident! Blessed be thy tongue that has spoken it!" Ibn Al Arabi set the words apart for meditation:

       I planted the seed within myself thus, in two verses:
 
       "On one side the Master rides: on the other side, his books.
       Tell me: his desires, were they at last fulfilled?"

In the same collection there are two occasional elegies, one for Ernest Hemingway, another for James Thurber. Merton speaks affectionately of Hemingway, who passes "briefly through our midst. Your books and writings have not been consulted. Our prayers are pro defuncto N."

How slowly this bell tolls in a monastery tower for a whole age, and for the quick death of an unready dynasty, and for that brave illusion: the adventurous self!

For with one shot the whole hunt is ended!

That for James Thurber is written in a tighter structure as Merton entreats him.

       Leave us, good friend, Leave our awful celebration
       With pity and relief.
       You are not called to solemnize with us
       Our final madness.
 
       You have not been invited to hear
       The last words of everybody.

Still another elegiac poem in the same collection, "An Elegy for Five Old Ladies," had its beginning in a New York Times report of their deaths, "ranging in age from 80 to 96," in a driverless car which, rolling across the lawn of a rest home, plunged into a lake.

       Let the perversity of a machine become our common
            study, while I name loudly five loyal
          spouses of death!

One of Merton's late poems, "Elegy for Father Stephen," first published in Commonweal, is for a fellow monk, one of whose duties was to tend a flower garden and prepare bouquets for the altars of the abbey church. Merton calls him "Confessor of exotic roses / Martyr of unbelievable gardens"—

       Whom we will always remember
       As a tender-hearted careworn
       Generous unsteady cliff
       Lurching in the cloister
       Like a friendly freight train
       To some uncertain station.

The metaphors are strong fibered, yet the poem carries no sadness as Merton recalls chance meetings with the monk.

       Sometimes a little dangerous at corners
       Vainly trying to smuggle
       Some enormous and perfect bouquet
       To a side altar
       In the sleeves of your cowl.

But on the day of the burial,

       A big truck with lights
       Moved like a battle cruiser
       Toward the gate
       Past your abandoned garden….

The closing lines of the elegy are tender and joyous:

       As if Leviathan
      Hot on the scent of some other blood
       Had passed you by
      And never saw you hiding among the flowers.

Though at the time this poem was written, October 1966, Merton was already experimenting with surrealistic techniques, this elegy moves through clusters of simple yet strong imagery.

Another theme that runs through the fabric of much of Merton's poetry, if not explicitly then implicitly, is that of a denunciation of the so-called "world," though it is well to recall that in an entry in an early Journal, dated December 18, 1941, four days after his entering the monastery, he wrote: "I never hated less the world, scorned it less, or understood it better." Thus, he writes of the "city" because it is a symbol of much that dehumanizes man; even the titles of certain of his poems indicate this, such as the early "Hymn of Not Much Praise for New York City":

       … never let us look about us long enough to wonder
       Which of the rich men, shivering in the overheated office,
       And which of the poor men, sleeping face-down on
       the Daily Mirror
       Are still alive, and which are dead.

"In the Ruins of New York":

       This was a city
       That dressed herself in paper money.
       She lived four hundred years
       With nickels running in her veins.

"And So Goodbye to Cities":

       For cities have grown old in war and fun
       The sick idea runs riot.

And in "How to Enter a Big City":

       Everywhere there is optimism without love
       And pessimism without understanding.

The city as a symbol of "modern society" and the emptiness of technological man who, in conforming himself to its dictates, tends to lose all spiritual orientation was a frequent Merton theme. He had said of technology that it "alienates those who depend on it and live by it. It deadens their human qualities and their moral perceptiveness." Yet at the same time he realized that it was a fact and a necessity of modern life. Yet there is a danger—

of technology becoming an end in itself and arrogating to itself all that is best and most vital in human effort: thus man comes to serve his machines instead of being served by them. This is completely irrational. One whom I have always admired as a great social critic—Charlie Chaplin—made this clear long ago in "Modern Times" and other films.

In a poem, "First Lesson About Man," he ironically describes this condition:

        Man begins in zoology
        He is the saddest animal
 
        He drives a big red car
        Called anxiety
        He dreams at night
        Of riding all the elevators
        Lost in the halls
        He never finds the right door.

In brief, flat statements Merton continues his description: "Whenever he goes to the phone / To call joy / He gets the wrong number / He knows all guns…. / He flies his worries / All around Venus…. / He drives a big white globe / Called death." The "lesson" is logically followed by an interrogation:

       Now dear children you have learned
       The first lesson about man
       Answer your text
 
       "Man is the saddest animal
       He begins in zoology
       And gets lost
       In his own bad news."

An earlier version of this last stanza read (two last lines): "And that is where he generally / Ends."

But Merton's vision of what an ideal world, an ideal city should be, he made explicit in his morality play, The Tower of Babel. As set in Augustinian context, he contrasts the city of man with the city of God—the former as symbol is destroyed "to give place to the light which it might have contained."

… This new city will not be the tower of sin, but the City of God. Not the wisdom of men shall build this city, nor their machines, not their power. But the great city shall be built without hands, without labor, without money and without plans. It will be a perfect city, built on eternal foundations, and it shall stand forever, because it is built by the thought and the silence and the wisdom and the power of God. But you, my brothers, and I are stones in the wall of this city. Let us run to find our places. Though we may run in the dark, our destiny is full of glory.

Sister Thérèse Lentfoehr, in her Words and Silence: On the Poetry of Thomas Merton, New Directions, 1979, 166 p.