A thematic preoccupation with memory dominates much of Merwin's poetry. Understanding Merwin's attitude toward memory and its function in the poem enhances one's understanding of his view of modern man.

Yet, if Merwin is fascinated by memory, that faculty of mind which recalls the past, his view of it is largely negative, with some exceptions. Through a careful reading of two poems concerned with Odysseus and his pathetic inability to retain the past in his memory, the reader can come to a better understanding of the reasons why Merwin's poetic career has been a running, agonized struggle with memory. In "Odysseus" and "Memory" … Merwin creates an Odysseus who experiences all the vacuity and futility encountered by modern man. In his travel-weariness, his inability to hold the past in memory or to cope with anything but the immediate present and above all, his lack of a real destination, Odysseus becomes a veritable symbol of alienated modern man…. "Odysseus" presents the view that human life and thought are cyclical, but that man is static amid the movement of life around him. (pp. 25-6)

Since life is sheer rote and monotony,… memory does not function at all: it can retain no clear image of the past, only what is visually present has real existence. Given this premise, Odysseus's apparent mindlessness follows logically; and we understand his inability to grasp the meaning of his existence or to distinguish different people and places, his inability to take a moral reading of his own course, or to remember his wife whom he has not seen in twenty years. (p. 26)

[In the end,] Odysseus moves on despite his inability to remember why; but he will reach home, though even after he gets there he still will not know why or how.

In later poems Merwin frequently returns to this theme of the human condition as an unknowing condition. He writes of man's ignorance—his inability to retain the past in his mind or even to live peaceably with the past—in poems which follow those of The Drunk in the Furnace.

"Memory" a prose poem published in The Miner's Pale Children, resumes the Odysseus theme…. The implications of the Odysseus story are worked out differently here than in "Odysseus." Homer's facts and imagery are more apparent in this more allusive piece; for example, the phrase "unravelling patience" in "Odysseus" becomes "See, the sailor emerges at last from the loom" in "Memory." And the guide Athene and the old milky-eyed dogs are referred to here whereas they are not in "Odysseus."

First through an associative debate and then through a literary reworking of the Odysseus theme, this prose poem probes the human uses of memory and their effectiveness. The prose poem begins abruptly. The "it" of the first sentence refers, of course, to "Memory," the title and subject of discussion here. In the first paragraph, the poet debates whether or not having a good memory is a virtue; though he stresses the evils of memory more than its virtues.

His theme from the start is that our belief that having a good memory is a virtue is possibly erroneous. Our respect for skill in remembering may simply be "our predilection for those deceits that have hoodwinked us in particular."… (pp. 27-9)

At the beginning of the second paragraph [of "Memory"] Merwin takes a firm stand on the issue: having a good memory, he says, can be "a source of terrible arrogance."… Memory is a "blind-folded" deity, and her blindness makes her capricious and unreliable…. Because memory has helped us live well and reasonably in the past, we begin to believe that it is the source of all intelligence and good sense. Most important and most dangerous, "It persuades us that nothing of the past remains except what we remember."… In the next step in the downward descent of over-dependence on memory it persuades "us that the present too would be meaningless without it,"… and this is the ultimate evil. The present is sufficient unto itself and does not need the bolstering of memory to give it validity and meaning. (p. 29)

The purpose of the first three paragraphs of "Memory" is to explode our myths and preconceptions about memory. The more subjective tone of the last sentence of the second paragraph is retained in the third paragraph where the pronoun "we" occurs with more frequency than before and where the poet is concluding the philosophical debate.

The elliptical reasoning of the third paragraph tells us that we are utterly bound to our necessities made virtues, our self-deceits. In our overdependence on memory we are slaves to our own private pasts. Here Merwin's easy conversational style … and his jumps in logic make his ideas more persuasive. Our world is really one of fragmentation and hopeless forgetfulness, he implies. Our "virtues" are not virtues at all, but are merely the inevitable result of our submission to fate. They are necessities seen through rose-colored glasses. The final question … dramatically and decisively ends his argument: it is obvious that memory is just a habit and not a virtue at all.

In the last two paragraphs of "Memory" Merwin relates the story of Odysseus's homecoming in a manner which is more allusive than direct. As in "Odysseus," the subject, the central character of the fable, is not named directly, but is simply referred to as "He" in the second sentence and as "the sailor" in the first…. It is as if Merwin were working hard to throw the reader off his trail here. The initial image metaphorically equates Odysseus's travels with weavings on the loom of destiny: they are preordained by the Fates.

The memory motif resumes in the second sentence of the paragraph…. Odysseus is sure that his guide Athene is "a personification of wisdom itself."… He is proud, convinced that he is wise and strong because his guide is. He is also convinced that he has brought his journey to a successful conclusion partly under his own initiative, but under divine guidance as well. However, the point of "Memory" is that we erroneously equate wisdom with memory the way Odysseus did. While in reality Odysseus had only his own mind and intelligence and memory as his guide through his wandering, he believed his guide was Athene, goddess of wisdom. Just as memory is a false deity, so here Athene is false to Odysseus because she falsely promotes his belief in his own memory. (pp. 29-30)

The final sentence in the paragraph … further contributes to the impression, now amounting to a certainty, that Odysseus does not really see this clear and present Ithaca at all. He is supremely confident of the power of his mind to control and understand present experience by marshalling past experience and noting the reasonable similarity between past and present. What is lacking here is Odysseus's own presence as well as his own emotional reaction to the place. Here, as in "Odysseus," we receive no deep impression of his identity, although he is the central focus and dominating consciousness of the prose poem.

Behind the lines of this final sentence one hears a smug, complacent man assuring himself that this is how he remembers it, half-fearful underneath that it is not….

In "Memory"'s last paragraph Odysseus' calm, purposeful rationality is overwhelmed by his untempered intuitive reaction to the place; he becomes aware of his horror of "His own presence in the place," "The standing on the needle," "The present."…

Merwin ingeniously imparts this radical shift in consciousness in a long panicky sentence … which is a string of nouns, prepositional phrases and a relative clause: altogether this sentence communicates the bewilderment Odysseus feels. He is overcome by the sheer immediacy of this for the first time truly present place. It is an immediacy which has hitherto been effaced by his more pressing concern for mere self-preservation…. It is ironic that this self-realization occurs on the third day, traditionally the day of resurrections. (p. 31)

The long clause beginning "That same oppression …" … most clearly expresses the horror he feels and has felt before in Ithaca; and the last phrase in the prose poem "The blankness …" … evokes again his sense of le néant now that the "story" of his wanderings is over.

In "Memory" Merwin suggests that Odysseus—and indeed every human being—tries to come to a sense of his own identity by piecing together the past and finding a continuity in his own actions, his means of approaching situations. This is the constant temptation, but rationalizing and idealizing memory is always deceptive. The problem is that memory is deceiving; a person can convince himself that the facts of the past were other than they were or he can change his memories to suit the demands of his identity. He can remember only the best parts of his past in order to be able to pride himself on it. Or, on the other hand, a person may remember only what is unimportant and forget what is worth remembering. Both memory and Athene are unreliable guides.

Finally, a subjective, overwhelming sense of the present invades Odysseus' hitherto rational, objective consciousness, and this sense of the present represses idealized memory, a fabricated imaginative construct.

For Merwin the only type of memory which is valid is the type which emerges spontaneously and involuntarily as a result of present impressions and one's own sense of presence at a particular time, in a particular place. This type of memory comes into action when Odysseus experiences a sense of alienation, a "sense of being utterly lost," on the third day in Ithaca and he becomes aware again of the oppression he has always known here and yet can never remember when he is not here. Although for the most part Merwin, the mature poet, is uneasy with memory and distrusts it when it does not emanate from the present, but is an idealized rehearsal of a present which is past and thus lives now only in the imagination, the intuitive, involuntary type of memory described above has validity for him because it springs from and participates in the present. It makes the present a means of holding onto experience, of gaining and growing from it. (pp. 31-2)