[In the review below, Pettingell offers a thematic analysis of The Rain in the Trees.]

It is no wonder that poetry concerned with spiritual perceptions tends to be pastoral. When people embody ideas from their inner life, they usually select metaphors from nature. The earliest examples of religious art we know are those luminous beasts our ancestors painted on the walls of their caves. The Greeks portrayed their deities coming to earth disguised as animals or birds. And in Holy Scripture the relationship between man and God is depicted in terms of sheep and their shepherd.

English poetry contains endless examples of scenic views mirroring psychic landscapes. Marvell insisted that the philosophic mind prefers life in "The Garden" where it can create "other worlds and other seas / Annihilating all that's made / To a green thought in a green shade." Wordsworth declared that "To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." From Shelley's skylark and Keats' nightingale to the thrush and blackbird of Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, poets have identified birdsong with the free flight of the imagination's "viewless wings."

But can pastoral survive deforestation? As fields become subdivisions, factories or waste dumps, as plants and animals dwindle into extinction because their habitat has been usurped, the idea of unspoiled wildness fades out of human experience and memory. Contemporary poetry thus sounds fragmented compared to what came before. Yet truthful writing must record the diminution of the natural that takes place as our artifice engulfs it. And no poet has realized this more acutely than W. S. Merwin. For over 35 years he has been shaping his lines, even his syntax, to reflect the growing blanks in our field of vision. If you doubt the point of such a deliberate process of poetic anorexia, Merwin offers a justification in "Losing a Language":

       A breath leaves the sentence and does not return
       Yet the old still remember something that they could say
 
       But they know now that such things are no longer believed
       and the young have fewer words
 
       many of the things the words were about
       no longer exist

Merwin is talking about concepts as much as things. The Rain in the Trees, in which this poem appears, is Merwin's 13th verse collection and a culmination of his long meditation on the evanescence of the natural world. The journey leading up to it can now be conveniently mapped by using his Selected Poems. Those who read each successive volume as it came out sometimes found Merwin's stylistic shifts bemusing—"Protean" was the word one eminent critic used to describe the poet's technique. From A Masque for Janus (1952) through The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) he established his mastery over form, traditional as well as modern. He played the musical nuances of language like a harp, achieving effects so polyphonic as to sound baroque in the earliest work. Yet from the first there were portents of something different to come: "Hills are to be forgotten; the patter of speech / Must lilt upon flatness." Sure enough, Merwin soon adopted plain diction. Fantasy gave way to stark allegories centered around man's arrogant destruction of whatever stands in his way:

       Well they cut everything because why not.
       Everything was theirs because they thought so.
       It fell into shadows and they took both away.
       Some to have and some for burning.

Despite the greater economy of linguistic means, Merwin was still borrowing from the authority of the English poetic tradition for his effects. In The Lice (1967), however, he innovated a new prosody; the ending of the line and the sense of the phrase substituted for punctuation:

       You confide
       In images in things that can be
       Represented which is their dimension you
       Require them to say This
       Is real and you do not fall down and moan

This form has the advantage of forcing the eye to hesitate, to study the stanza listening carefully for where the pauses should fall. One notices how intensely Merwin scrutinizes the world, how sharply he cocks his ears toward the faintest rustle. The absent commas and periods haunt his lines like ghosts, reinforcing the loss of familiar continuity. Only rarely is a style invented that so effectively leads the reader to see through the author's lenses.

Merwin does not inject his ego directly into his poems. His monologues in other voices remind one that he is also a playwright and translator. When not adopting another character he remains aloof, conveying the impression of one whose highest aspiration is to receive outside stimuli—like Emerson's "transparent eyeball." In spite of his self-effacement—quite a contrast to the efforts of most poets to increase their own presence in their poems—a Merwin stanza cannot be mistaken for anything else. Many have imitated his manner without nearly achieving his results. Merwin's prosody is no gimmick—it is a mode of spiritual expression, an outgrowth of his realization that speech must indeed "lilt upon flatness" if it is to bring others to face the denuded world which we inhabit.

Bearers of bad news often have doors slammed in their faces. Some critics have chastised Merwin for taking a "starved mute stance." The reproof overlooks the paradoxical fact that tragic loss, though it brings misery to life, can be transformed by art into a source of pleasure: "When the pain of the world finds words / they sound like joy / and often we follow them / with our feet of earth / but when the joy of the world finds words they are painful / and often we turn away / with our hands of water". Discussing Merwin's themes may create an aura of unrelieved gloom; the poems themselves radiate mystery.

This is particularly true of The Rain in the Trees. In the 13 incandescent love poems that open the volume Merwin does not attempt to erase losses, but develops coping strategies. Like Wordsworth, he returns to childhood, recreating a boy's watchful sensitivity to his surroundings—inanimate objects as well as the bewildering moods of grown-up society:

      the black river says no my father says no
      my mother says no in the streets they say nothing
      they walk past one at a time in hats
      with their heads down
      it is wrong to answer them through the green fence
      the street cars go by singing to themselves I am iron
      the broom seller goes past in the sound of grass
      by the tree touching the tree I hear the tree
      I walk with the tree
      we talk without anything

The boy digs a cave "among the roots waiting / when the lion comes to the tree", a familiar kind of imaginative child's play. But in the poem the fabulous beast introduces a wild note of anticipation.

Throughout The Rain in the Trees one can detect hints of renewal in Merwin's visions of ruin, but they are terrible as much as hopeful. Addressing insects as "elders," the poet acknowledges that "we remember imagining that what survived us / would be like us / / and would remember the world as it appears to us / but it will be your eyes that will fill with light". The ruthless way we have been "eating the forests" has made us a kind of kin to this mighty class of creatures, the earth's most populous. "Tongues of the Future," Merwin calls them; "their own meaning in a grammar without horizons … never important they are everything". We can, with difficulty, picture the era that was dominated by dinosaurs, but our fancy boggles at a post-history ruled over by beings with six legs, exoskeletons and clacking wing cases, so lacking in individuality that their intelligence is communal.

Ruskin defined the Pathetic Fallacy in poetry as the projection of human feeling onto the universe. Merwin consciously recognizes how remote this device is from our current poetic practices. With the defoliation of the world—which, Merwin points out, was under way even as Keats was listening to his nightingale—"an age arrived when everything was explained in another language"; hence the disjointed style of modern verse. In "After the Alphabets," one of his insect poems, Merwin himself tries to comprehend a brave new world of arthropods almost as a Zen exercise in emptying the self. Perhaps, he theorizes, they too preserve their past in art; consider how that unwelcome oriental immigrant, the rose beetle, turns leaves "into an arid net / into sky / like the sky long ago over China". If this is a version of the Pathetic Fallacy, it is a valedictory one.

Merwin may be the supreme mystic poet writing in North America today. He has relentlessly assimilated the hard truths science has forced on us, while most of his contemporaries were reiterating age-old angst and disguising their familiar sentiments with new forms. He has fasted in the deserts of the imagination and done penance for our inhumanity, all so that he could lose that crippling self-consciousness Blake called "the mind-forged manacles." The Lice and The Carrier of Ladders (1970) represented his Dark Night of the Soul. Now he has purified his vision enough to move on. As I read him, his latest wisdom is that if we can humbly accept that we are a branch of the tree, not its crown, and that other eyes "will fill with light" when ours close, we will have attained a pastoral philosophy fitting to the 20th century.