The poetry of W. S. Merwin comprises things both old and new. Since his first volume A Mask for Janus won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1952, he has in his own way looked forward and backward, developing a distinctive voice as he has mastered a diversity of influence. There have been the years of apprenticeship to Robert Graves on one hand, and on the other the residual but potent influence of the medieval literature in which he has translated extensively. (p. 159)

The occasional medieval posture and the attention to traditional forms in the early years gave way quite abruptly to the dynamics of free association and the psychological dimensions of surrealism. The poetry of the last ten years, however, has explored and broadened the connections between these two seemingly divergent strains. The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) actually begins the transition, and it shows the difficulty in achieving a balance. Merwin speaks here in a strained and roughed-up dramatic colloquy, both consorting with the contrasting elaborate stanzaic forms. A good deal of the volume seems in retrospect to be the expression of an imaginative psyche that growls about the chains which he insists on gilding. The Lice (1967) witnesses an imaginative liberation which in a way ransoms its freedom with the gold of that same inheritance. (pp. 159-60)

Merwin has turned slowly from the estrangement and condensed bitter eloquence of The Lice. In The Compass Flower he draws upon his personal experience, realizing the possibility of emotional fulfillment in a love relation whose crown and focus is the sequence of love poems "Kore." His new priority shows everywhere in a celebration of life lived along the fibre of the sensual being. In this regard, the "Flower" in the title is a symbol of the perfected body of love. The "Compass" is a figure of journeys. Life and art interpenetrate. The book marks a milestone in his attitude and a turning point in his poetic. In the first of its four parts, we see the poet Merwin in transition. The new experience is approached through the processes of the new poetic. There is, likewise, a self-conscious reorientation of earlier techniques. (p. 160)

In "Guardians" Merwin constructs a symbolic tableau that is almost Spenserian in complexity. He is representing that problematical relation between the poet's impulse to formulate meanings and his insulation from experience…. The difficulty of launching the poetic imagination into experience is the guide; she "who is Fear of the Journey" is the Muse companionable. The antitheses of "Fear" and "Journey" are more finely honed in the image of her hands of "cloud and glass"—protection and exposure, the aura and the transparence which she as tutelar spirit is to inspire. What the poem promises, perched atop this ladder of contraries, is a carefully and consciously defined space in which Merwin's poetic expertise and the facts of his experience can respect each other. Several lyrics may be examined as examples of the precept. Where he succeeds, technique is more than mere mechanism. The poetic embodies a compelling and unique sensibility. (pp. 161-62)

In "November", the cloud and glass take the forms of two antithetical temporal schemes—nature's recurrent cycle and evolution's linear process…. The commitment to the data of sense experience has a logical adjunct in a kind of proto-scientific humility and lack of preconception in the face of elementary facts. There is an openness in the whole dialectical structure that includes the pastoral poet's scheme of renascent nature and the scientific outlook. The dichotomy is clear; the last lines respond to that with an utter gratuity. And the rude realistic streak clears the poem of any charge of verbal self-hypnosis. The poem's paradox is built into the poetic of cloud and glass: Merwin succeeds in expressing a sensibility that subsumes longing and reality, prescience and presence, imagination and experience.

The coherent strength of this new poetic is shown in a significant correlative. The idea of the journey of the poetic imagination into experience implies a quest motif. This pursuit seems to me to generate and unify two cycles of poems—the second and third sections of the volume compose one sequence of two parts. The series of lyric moments is a consistent drama of consciousness, addressing the recurrent concerns of sensory presence and emotional and imaginative fulfillment in it. The hero is the poetic imagination, standing behind the glass shield that is his visionary lens. His task is to focus and transfigure all at once. There is a fresh beginning, a struggle and crisis, and an exaltation in the long love poem "Kore." Drawing in Part II on his years of residence in New York, the poet plays protagonist in the arena of urban experience. The new poetic is put on the line. (pp. 163-64)

The speaker's stance "in many windows" reflects the position of estrangement in "Estuary." When the poet steps back, the urban experience is unregenerate, and the stone giant becomes a pebble under the poet's tongue. When he is both antagonist and protagonist, the problem of the poetic isolato cannot revert to polemics—as it may among the younger poetic athletes. The poetic of cloud and glass underlies the tension between the giant's incandescent outline and the facts of experience. It may be seen in this way as a kind of metaphysical conceit that encloses rich psychological content.

The dilemma is not resolved in the second part of the book. The major symbols and motifs—stone, wasteland, journey, animation as regeneration—are transposed onto a new plane in Part III. The natural setting here is salted with the desire of a lover in a physical relationship, and he uses the symbols and images of Part II to recall and resolve the disaffection of the urban experience. The self is drawn out to the objective world through a relation of reciprocal subjects. While the separate poems work as dramatic moments of consciousness in the lyric mode, they induce and arrive at the substance and shape of a vision. (p. 166)

There is for Merwin at this point in his career an internal and essential relation between the regenerative processes of love and poetry. The long love poem "Kore" is built on this equation. The cycle of short lyrics is arranged under the headings of the letters of the Greek alphabet; the sum of the parts is a serial form of the poetic grammar; and the whole is the perfection of desire. It reflects the two-fold theme in the title…. It is as well an appropriate place to conclude the discussion of the poetic of cloud and glass. There are two lyrics whose juxtaposition evinces our major points about the tension between longing and fact. Here the cloud and glass take the form of prophecy and attainment…. The Sibyl, who foretold the future by deciphering the inscriptions on her leaves, is drawn here as the foil of the love poet. She represents emotion on the installment plan, the investment of desire into an imagined future where longing compounds interest in illusions about what love is or should be. The juxtaposition of the two lyrics comprises the tensions we have seen throughout. The lover's heart doubts when the message of the senses is erased: the hero-poet turns that into a gold lamp on the experience at hand. The absent woman is not the gilded object of imagination: she is an anima to inspire the mode of imaginative relation to "the days of cities". The hint of a restoration suggests the regenerative role she plays in the natural world of Part III. Her "eyes of arrival" bring us full circle…. A version of traditional symbolism is preserved to encode his access to real experience, not to record his insulation from it. The Compass Flower marks an end and a beginning in the adventure of this distinctive American poet. (pp. 167-68)