Of the immortal in “Blue” Merwin writes, “There is no pity in him. Where would he have learned it?”¹ Colder than any of his contemporaries, the poet himself seems to aspire to such supernatural neutrality. Even more than the glacial Wallace Stevens he has actually achieved what Stevens called “a mind of winter,”² not simply in order to behold Nothing, but to describe human emptiness with the chill accuracy it deserves. And in a time of apocalyptic poetry no one else confronts the End with such inhuman calm, such studious avoidance of fear or exultation. Even when Merwin seems to welcome the apocalypse he does so in a minor key, quietly; his recent poetry is dominated by undertones. At first his voice was not quite so muted, nor his preoccupations so consistently grim. Though always drawn to the empty places of the imagination, Merwin wrote, as late as The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), about a variety of things in an impressive variety of tones. But in the series of volumes he has published since The Moving Target (1963) he has revealed himself to be as single-minded as he was once various. The poet of many styles is now occupied with refining one style, sometimes monotonously, and that style focuses with obsessive frequency on the subject for which it seems to have been devised: human emptiness and cultural death.

Clearly Merwin's transformation has made him a far more striking poet than he was in the fifties, as is suggested by the critical eloquence his later collections have inspired. Harvey Gross suggests “that they are written after the end; the poems they contain are fragmentary messages scratched on shards and crumbling stones,”³ and Richard Howard, with a rhetorical flair extreme even for him, describes the poems in Target as “the fewmets of what Yeats rightly called a dying animal.”⁴ Since Gross and Howard wrote (before the publication in 1970 of The Carrier of Ladders), it has become increasingly clear that the poet has found his single voice; the compelling question is how, and how that voice reflects Merwin's apocalyptic and oracular concerns. In the early sixties Merwin's vision of the world was changing along with his conception of the function of poetry; both changes were to some extent typical of his time. The poetic change seems by now a common one, also experienced by such contemporaries of Merwin as James Wright and Robert Bly.⁵ With the increasingly surrealist style that characterizes present poetry there has developed a sense of the mystical or oracular role of the poet; in fact the oracular tendencies of contemporary poetry have become so dominant that when a thinker like Merwin writes theoretically about the nature of poetic utterance, one of his conspicuous problems is to distinguish it from theology. Introducing the aphorisms of Antonio Porchia, which he doubtless chose to translate because of a sense of deep affinity with him, he writes:

the entries and the work as a whole assume and evoke the existence of an absolute, of the knowledge of it which is truth, and of the immense desirability of such knowledge. … Porchia's utterances are obviously, in this sense, a spiritual, quite as much as a literary, testament. … It is [their] ground of personal revelation and its logic, in the sentences, that marks their kinship, not with theology but with poetry.⁶

Predictably this description works for Merwin's poetry too, though in both Merwin and Porchia the nature of the absolute remains hidden behind various veils, the most common of which is death.

Merwin's “A Scale in May,” published in The Lice in 1967, the year of his translation of Voices, is a series of aphoristic statements reminiscent of Porchia. One of the most strangely compelling reads:

Of all the beasts to man alone death brings justice
But I desire
To kneel in a doorway empty except for the song

(Lice, p. 50)

The sense of an absolute here is almost eclipsed by the sense of its mystery, but the outline of a meaning is clear. “Justice” means not simply retribution—though clearly only man can deserve death, and the mankind Merwin describes in Lice deserves nothing better. Justice also has something to do with an ultimate revelation, “the song” that as always in Merwin comes, or may come, only from emptiness; man cannot deserve this knowledge, which lies beyond his patterns of knowing, but he cannot help desiring it, hoping for some final compromise between justice and desire. Constantly Merwin suggests that some revelation may accompany the end man clearly does deserve: the End. “Death” in Target and especially in Lice usually means death for everyone, and often premonitions of that destruction blot out vision:

The bird of the end with its
Colorless feet
Has walked on windows
In the mirrors the star called Nothing
Cuts us off

(Target, p. 63)

However, Merwin confronts the End not only with absolute belief in its imminence (“I am sure now,” he writes in “Glimpse of the Ice,” Lice, p. 46) but with equanimity and even quiet eagerness. For if death darkens our collective vision it may bring its own incredible illumination “so that we may know why”:

some alien blessing
is on its way to us
some prayer ignored for centuries
is about to be granted to the prayerless
in this place

(Carrier, p. 75)

Of course an “alien blessing” may be experienced as a curse; Merwin's interest in what happens to the prayerless as often derives from an ambivalent desire for retributive justice as for undeserved revelation. The reasons for the desire, and for his sudden preoccupation with ends, can be found not only in the poet's eccentric soul but—to give Merwin some credit for an awareness which is now becoming more common—in the collapsing world. One external factor that doubtless helped to change Merwin's sense of the world while his poetic style was changing was an incident in the American protest movement with which he became deeply involved in 1962, after the publication of Drunk and before the radically different Target. In San Francisco, anti-bomb demonstrators attempted to sail the trimaran Everyman, itself a moving target, into the Atomic Energy Commission nuclear test area near Christmas Island in the Pacific; naturally the boat was stopped just outside the harbor, and the test was continued. Merwin's account of the attempt and the related trial and demonstrations filled an entire (Christmas) issue of the Nation. It is a report written more in anger than in sorrow, and lightened by very little hope. Though Merwin's sympathy for the protesters is clear, his sense of the futility of their mission in the face of official American stupidity and self-destructiveness is dominant. And his grim vision of the future is evident, though he remains the comparatively objective reporter, letting others voice his prophecy. He quotes a cynical but perfectly logical onlooker: “Maybe that's why the human race isn't justified in looking forward to a long and happy future. They've temporized with everything. It's too late for an act of conscience, any act of conscience, to be effective any longer.” Then he paraphrases a somewhat more dramatic (or poetic) rendition of the same idea, the traditional old black woman's scenario projecting the ocean's response to the bomb. “Going to rise up. Going to blow up and destroy the whole beautiful earth God gave them, and God is going to let them do it because they don't care for each other at all any more.”⁷

This sounds like an abstract formulation of the dominant idea behind The Lice, which Merwin would publish five years later, a collection which focuses on the End even more mercilessly than Target. The apocalyptic poetry he wrote in the middle sixties frequently shows the same political awareness Merwin brought to his report of the Everyman demonstrations. The decayed empire that seems to welcome its own collapse in “Unfinished Book of Kings” has distinctly American characteristics, conspicuous at the last:

V

… the lips of the last prophets had fallen
from the last trees

VI

They had fallen without sound they had not stayed in spite
of the assurances proceeding from the mouths of the presidents
in the money pinned thick as tobacco fish over the eyes
of the saints

VII

And in spite of the little votes burning at the altars

(Lice, p. 113)

In this land of no possible “assurances,” no human contact, the End comes because men have failed to “care for each other at all,” and the violence of that failure is usually the violence of war. In “The Gods,” which describes “the other world” already come as a lone survivor waits “Till night wells up through the earth” (Lice, p. 30), the only evidence of human life beyond his dying voice is “the fighting in the valley” which has been constant for “centuries.” “The gods are what has failed to become of us.”

Like many Americans Merwin had of course considered the possibility of cultural destruction before the Everyman protest, but his few early treatments of the subject seem more to subject it to ultimate play than to consider it seriously. “Birds Waking” goes so far as to say “let it be now,” (Green, p. 71) but only in the context of an elaborate conceit. And “One-Eye” (Drunk, p. 34), despite the symbolic suggestiveness of the descending giant thumb which threatens the unsuspecting country of the blind, is located in an old legend kept comparatively remote from poet and readers. Though effective, these poems simply lack the visceral significance that attaches even to the least of the later apocalyptic poems in collections like Carrier, where Merwin repetitiously but convincingly creates a burned out landscape that seems almost physically present. The difference is not only a change in Merwin's sense of political reality, but an altered conception of mythic reality, one which deepens the final significance of his stylistic changes. Merwin begins as a mythic poet but ends an oracular one; though the two tend to use the same materials, the basic distance between them is immense.

Like Merwin's sudden interest in final destruction, this change in the poet is cultural as well as personal. Many American poets and critics in the fifties, influenced partly through Eliot by the preoccupation with classical tales that still dominates British poetry, grew fascinated by myth, but myth considered at a distance. Myths were simply ancient stories, with their own “universal” truth, of course, but that truth was usually rather abstract, metaphorical, something to be worked up out of The Golden Bough rather than one's own deep visions. And if the mythic or magical materials failed to match the poet's theory, they could be changed; so Eliot “quite arbitrarily” invented new Tarot cards “to suit my own convenience”⁸ in “The Waste Land.” Few poets would do so today, though critics continue to regard mythic utterances with a certain protective cynicism. Gross, for instance, still (in 1970) insists that Merwin's idea of the End is a “metaphor,” even a “sustaining fiction.”⁹

When W. H. Auden, in his (1952) introduction to A Mask for Janus explains that Merwin's mythic poetry succeeds because it is not “a mere elegant manifestation of the imaginative work of the dead without any live relation to the present of the writer or his reader” (Janus, p. viii) we can only admire the precision with which he describes the problem, and disagree with his evaluation. Two decades later Janus seems, in part because of its self-conscious and often archaic elegance, a collection of beautiful imitations, visions of past myths not vivified by any real sense of a present consciousness, and therefore unsuccessful even in evoking the past. There is no face behind the mask of the title; the mystery at the heart of myth is too easily subdued by excesses of technical “control.”

Merwin's elegant technique is less self-conscious, more assured, in The Dancing Bears, but myths are still exploited primarily as metaphors, as fables with various morals. “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” is a rather beautiful rendition of the old poor-girl-loves were-bear tale,¹⁰ but despite its professed interest in the nature of interaction between human and alien consciousness, it seems to contain neither convincing humans nor convincing animals, only dazzling scenes and Stevens-like speculation on the nature of reality. Merwin intentionally distances the story with frequent reminders that it is a fantasy, and he deliberately defuses its magic with the line “‘All magic is but metaphor.’” The girl's ultimate response—“‘All metaphor,’ she said, ‘is magic’” (Bears, pp. 50, 59)—is hardly calculated to restore the mystery. Fifteen years later, in Carrier, Merwin published another poem revolving around the same general idea of ambiguously erotic animal-human love, though in “The Paw” the narrator-lover is male and the object of his love not a human turned beast but an actual she-wolf. The symbolism in “The Paw” remains implicit, and Merwin has learned not to attempt to explain the mystery at the heart of the poem. Here the intention is not to employ animals in the service of human speculation, but to feel a way into animal consciousness, or at least into the mysterious realm between human and natural, which is the real source of whatever magic there is, and whatever genuine myth.

Merwin's poetry of mythic and mystical exploration becomes progressively more convincing, in visceral human terms, as he moves deeper into the animal world, prospecting for new myths rather than revising old ones. Generally the beast poems make Green with Beasts wholly more successful than Bears, though the collection also contains several fine poems of human interaction with the inanimate world. “The Mountain” is a speculation on the origins of myth and mysticism which remains suggestive rather than prescriptive, which does not explain myth away but retains the mystery of confrontation with an alien strangeness. But in the same volume “The Annunciation” provides a typical contrast, failing even as it enunciates the mystical concerns that will animate much of Merwin's finest later poetry. Though stylistically direct and beautiful in some particulars, the poem seems forced, in part because Merwin again exploits a traditional myth for its metaphorical possibilities. Even the old abstracter Eliot conveys, in Four Quartets, a more convincing sense of Christian mythology, doubtless because for him the myth is really believable.

And real belief is finally the point. For Merwin too, as for many of his contemporaries, the ultimate stage in the poetic use of myth is genuine acceptance of mystery, the discovery of a mythic vein so deeply felt that it lies beyond abstracting metaphor—because it lies beneath the kinds of reasoning on which metaphor depends. Merwin the oracular surrealist will develop a mythic consciousness which has much in common with the primitive mythic imagination, especially its instinctive animism and its conviction that unknowable cosmic patterns exist at the root of mystery, but he will achieve this by creating a new arcane symbolism touching on the old but not derived from it. By 1970, in the prose collection The Miner's Pale Children, Merwin had evolved visions—like “Blue” and the apocalyptic “The Dark Sower”—characterized by a new sense of mystery balanced by a stylistic clarity not always evident in his late poetry. Like acts of magic, many of these visions compel belief as they resist explication; without apology they are based on the conviction that the miraculous is the ground of existence.

Viewed retrospectively, the emergence of surrealism in Merwin's style, which accompanied his developing mystical concerns and his fascination with the apocalypse, seems a logical extension of stylistic and thematic tendencies already evident in Green and even Janus, which some Merwin critics consider so atypical or so inferior as not to be worthy of mention.¹¹ Inevitably a poet whose early stylistic experimentation suggests a basic discontent with the available linguistic forms, perhaps a discontent with language itself, would ultimately choose a style marked by a reaching beyond language, and refine that style until it became progressively more terse, the poems on the page surrounded by more and more of the empty white space of possibility. But the surrealism that Merwin developed in Target, made his own in Lice, and exercised sometimes to the point of repetition in Carrier and the recent Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment, was not simply the exfoliation of his own concerns. The years of writing the poems in Target and Lice were also years when Merwin translated extensively, especially continental and Latin American poetry in which magic is commonplace, from the crude fairy tale magic of medieval Spanish ballads to the sophisticated tranformational magic of Lorca or Neruda.

At least in the twentieth century, the strength of American poetry seems to depend on periodic infusions of vitality from other literatures—French and Oriental at the beginning of the century, Spanish and Oriental in the late fifties and early sixties. The genesis of new American movements is aided by foreign seeds, and the influence is not merely stylistic; a transmitted style carries with it a vision of the world, and now the Spanish even more than the oriental influence seems to encourage in our poets an implicitly mystical vision. About influence, of course, we can never be sure in any individual instance. Merwin probably owes more to Wallace Stevens, himself influenced by French symbolists and interested in evolving a contemporary mythic vision, than to Pablo Neruda. He has said, “I have felt impelled to keep translation and my own writing more and more sharply separate” (Translations, p. viii). But sometimes the separation is not readily apparent; the general changes in his style too often parallel his general tendencies as a translator. Even this proves nothing absolute about influence; a sensitive poet translator must instinctively or consciously choose poetry that reflects tendencies already developing in his own work. Clearly Merwin was a master of aphoristic poetry before he translated Porchia's Voices, or the collection of folk sayings Asian Figures. But he was not a surrealist master before he translated Neruda (in 1959) or Follain (first in 1960). These two must have had a deep effect on him, though he doubtless read them with a disposition to be influenced. Clearly he reads them with an attentiveness unusual among contemporary translators, never, like Lowell, pulling the poem into his own territory, always attempting to render it entirely in its own terms.

If anything, Merwin's translations are too cautious, too literal. A comparative reading of his and Robert Bly's renditions (both presented as straight translations, neither “imitations”) of Neruda's “Walking Around” reveals surprising differences. Bly acknowledges strong influence from Neruda, and he has done more than anyone to develop American awareness of Spanish surrealism. His version of the poem catches more of the energy of the original, but he accomplishes this partly by improvising rather freely with individual words. Three versions of the first stanza:

Sucede que me canso de ser hombre
Sucede que entro en las sastrerías y en los cines
marchito, impenetrable, como un cisne de fieltro
navegando en un agua de origen y ceniza
As it happens, I am tired of being a man.
As it happens I go into tailors' shops and movies
all shrivelled up, impenetrable, like a felt swan
navigating on a water of origin and ash.

(Merwin)

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt.
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

(Bly)¹²

In the first line Bly's “sick” is more effective, but the customary meaning of “canso” is “tired”; Merwin's translation of “impenetrable” as “impenetrable” is a good deal less imaginative but more accurate than Bly's “waterproof”; the same is true for the rendition “origin” for “origen,” which may suggest “wombs” but does not mean that. Only in one instance in this poem does Merwin translate more freely than Bly; he renders “dar muerte a una monja” “knock a nun stone dead,” while Bly contents himself with “kill a nun.” Here Merwin adds the colloquial phrase to emphasize the unifying stone imagery of the poem, a vein of imagery already dominant in his own poetry. But usually his predilections are not evident. Closer in spirit to Neruda from the beginning, Bly feels less hesitant to release his own characteristic tone. Merwin, whose poetry in 1959 sounded nothing like this, listened more carefully to the surface of the poem, like one learning a new language.

What he learned is now common, though not always well described. Surrealism is the language of transformation; it has too often been called the language of distortion by those with a bias toward traditional realism or impressionism. Unless its transformations are purely reductive—every surrealist movement has its evil dadas—they work a direct magic on ordinary vision, suggesting hidden patterns in the visible world, inevitably moving toward the creation of myth. Sometimes the transformations simply involve jarring alterations of perspective, the changes that characterize some of Merwin's prose in Miner's. But usually the reshaping of vision is accomplished by more radical devices. The most striking of these is something like traditional personification, carried to untraditional lengths in the service of an animistic vision of the world. While personification makes a brief gift of human characteristics to the nonhuman, animism supposes a complete being, with continuous consciousness and a mode of perceiving not necessarily analogous to human modes. Merwin translates Jean Delisle's poem about “The wakening of the minerals”:

When they will come
At night into the villages
And ambush the squeals of the unweaned
And steal their names.

(Translations, p. 143)

The assumption of alien consciousness goes beyond animism when it treats parts of the body as independent beings or—more strangely—when comparatively abstract things are described not only as concrete but aware. The two devices combine in Lorca's “The Little Mute Boy,” about a boy whose voice is stolen by crickets: “(The captive voice, far away, / Put on a cricket's clothes)” (Translations, p. 82). Such extensions of animism lead into mythic territory.

Both in the primitive folk poetry that Merwin often translates and in contemporary surrealism, especially Spanish, a dominant preoccupation with death overshadows any device, or any angle of vision. More often than not death is the animated abstraction in the center of the poem's field of vision, or it becomes the context which defines the view. Death in this poetry is curiously beautiful. Merwin translates a Juan Ramón Jimenez poem about “the resplendent and blessed dream, / the bud of death flowering,” where death is described as “the water / that flows from the infinite / into your white hand” (Translations, p. 78). Imagery of dark water, or, here, “dead water,” or water under the earth probably occurs in the death poetry of any culture; it appears particularly in Spanish poetry and in recent American surrealist poetry by Roethke, Plath, Dickey, Bly, and others. Usually the death-water is connected somehow with sleep, the moon (or its tides), and women, as it is in the Jimenez poem. Inevitably the pattern of images occurs in Merwin, for instance in “Sailor Ashore,” in which the grounded sailor still feels the flow of ocean underfoot:

                                                                                                                                  … the waters are
Under the earth. Nowhere to run from them.
It is their tides you feel heaving under you,
Sucking you down, when you close your eyes with women.

(Drunk, p. 7)

Merwin's tone goes against the tradition. When Roethke or Bly writes about death it becomes desirable, in fact loveable, not so much because it leads to new life—as it may in more traditional mystical poets—but because it creates a corporeal union with the flow of time and matter into eternity. When Bly writes “we move to the death we love / With pale women”¹³ he means it literally, and he is not describing a neurotic state. Further he argues, in an essay called “Wild Association,” that “the sense of the presence of death”—Lorca's “duende”—provides the energy behind the surrealist associative leaps in the deepest spiritual poetry. Bly quotes Lorca's statement, “The magical quality of a poem consists in its being always possessed by the duende, so that whoever beholds it is baptized with dark water.”¹⁴

Despite his equal preoccupation (especially in Lice) with this dark water, and his shared intimation of the revelation possible in death, Merwin lacks such love for the sense of death. He may describe earthly existence as “a sickness” (Lice, p. 74), and call the living “us the unfinished” (Lice, p. 4); in “For the Anniversary of My Death” he calls life “a strange garment,” and suggests a sort of reverence for death, finally “bowing not knowing to what” (Lice, p. 58). But his respect for death seldom turns enthusiastic; unlike Jimenez (or Bly, or Plath) he will never visualize it flowering. What death is for Merwin is suggested by a very different image from the same Jimenez poem, a picture of death as “the black / mouth of the first nothing.” Here is the blank heart of Merwin's fascination: death considered not as a way to union but as the entrance to nothing, which for him is more obsessively present than any of the things which it is not.

Not only is Merwin's preoccupation with nothing basically dissimilar to anything in the American oracular poets who share his interest in the revelations of death and apocalypse, but it even sets him apart from the Spanish poets who have made a whole genre of the poetry of negation. Differences in tone suggest basic dissimilarities. Neruda's “Walking Around,” animated by a desire for nonexistence (more for blank emptiness than actual death) can be characterized by its negations; its seminal statement is “I do not want …” But through his denials of all types of being the speaker in Neruda's poem achieves a fierce positive energy. Indicatively, while this energy is intensified in Bly's translation—by his blunt colloquialisms, his emphasis on objects in the poem—it is considerably reduced by Merwin's more cool, meditative, and abstract rendition. In fact Neruda rendered by Merwin sounds, comparatively, like Bly's idea of a French, not Spanish, surrealist. “French surrealism and Spanish surrealism both contain wonderful leaps, but whereas French surrealism often longs for the leaps without any specific emotion—many believe that the unconscious does not have emotions—the Spanish poets believe that it does. The poet enters the poem excited, with the emotions alive; he is angry or ecstatic, or disgusted. There are a lot of exclamation marks, visible or invisible.”¹⁵ Like Jean Follain, whose poetry Merwin translated in Transparence of the World, Merwin often regards nothingness, like death, with an emotional blankness which may logically be appropriate to it. Admiringly, he writes “the evocation of this ‘impersonal,’ receptive, but essentially unchanging gaze often occupies, in Follain's work, the place of the first person.”¹⁶

Especially when the object of his gaze is the Nothing that may contain revelation, Merwin's vision is not always so neutral, not always unadulterated by suggestions of joy. In his Borgesian story “The Permanent Collection” he describes an ornate museum, the monument to a tragic winter love, full of empty picture frames and statueless pedestals; naturally most visitors to the museum become irritated or bored, but there are “those who emerge from time to time in silence, with their faces shining” (Miner's, p. 198). The effect here is derivative, but the idea is essential: in nothing there is implied a basic something, something indescribable. Merwin often suggests that it is available only to those able to efface themselves enough to be genuinely receptive to what is not alien, what can only be nothing to their human understanding. One of Wallace Stevens' clearest expressions of this idea occurs in the final lines of “The Snow Man,” which Merwin, enormously influenced by Stevens, probably has by heart:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.(17)

Merwin writes many such invocations to internal transparency; in “The Well” he describes “immortal” water, silent but “with all its songs inside it”:

It is a city to which many travellers
come with clear minds
having left everything even
heaven
to sit in the dark praying as one silence
for the resurrection

(Carrier, p. 37).

Such traditional Christian mystics as St. Theresa speak of the Prayer of Silence in describing the via negativa, though while they hoped to empty their minds to accommodate God, Merwin seeks to internalize the secrets hidden in water, or animals, or things: “oh objects come and talk with us while you can” (Carrier, p. 107).

But if psychic emptiness permits mystic openness it remains psychic emptiness. In a brief evocative piece on “the negative aesthetic,” Sandra McPherson tentatively says of one Merwin poem “my first thought was that he took the easy way out by trying to make a dead end into something profound.”¹⁸ Over a decade earlier, before Merwin's full development as a surrealist, M. L. Rosenthal, also tentatively, proposed the possibility of “some inhibition of psychic energy in Merwin's imaginative make-up.”¹⁹ Clearly some of Merwin's poetry is weakened by failures of energy, to such an extent that it is not simply cool or subtle, but passive, almost motionless. Paradoxically, the emptiness which kills a poem is difficult to distinguish, in any concrete way, from the emptiness which opens the poet to the world, to the Nothing which conceals plenitude. In fact there is a deeper paradox: the two types of emptiness may not be mutually exclusive. The very consciousness of the deadening sort of spiritual emptiness may—as in the traditional dark night of the soul—create the desperate energy necessary for the leap into a state of absolute receptivity to otherness. Surely this is consistent with Merwin's frequent suggestions that the apocalyptic culmination of our cultural and spiritual decadence provides the ground for some ultimate revelation. Even now, a growing sense of cultural desperation prompts us at least to ask basic questions, in ways that Merwin plays on in the prose piece “Make This Simple Test,” which begins by posing questions about the unimaginable adulteration of our food by chemicals and ends, “Guess at the taste of water. Guess what the rivers see as they die. Guess why the babies are burning. Guess why there is silence in heaven. Guess why you were ever born” (Miner's, p. 19).

On the other hand, while spiritual desperation may involve a desire for revelation, it may also block revelation, and this becomes part of Merwin's obsessive theme. More often than not, he writes of the failure of vision, silence in heaven, a silence rendered more frustrating by the felt imminence of revelation. Despite the vocabulary he shares with Bly and the other poets of imminent spiritual realities, Merwin is a poet of spiritual distance, separation. The contrast shows conspicuously in two poems which use the biblical Noah story to explore the one common theme of communication between men and spiritually sensitive animals. In Genesis Noah sends birds over the flood to find land. Bly's “Where We Must Look for Help” celebrates the (apocryphal) crow, who “shall find new mud to walk upon.”²⁰ The title and the generally triumphant tone of the human speaker in the poem suggest that the crow's discovery will eventually become man's. But Merwin's “Noah's Raven” is spoken by the raven, who unlike Bly's or Gary Snyder's or James Dickey's holy beasts rejects the task of bringing the word to men, and refuses to return to Noah:

Why should I have returned?
My knowledge would not fit into theirs.
I found untouched the desert of the unknown,
Big enough for my feet. It is my home.
It is always beyond them.

(Target, p. 10)

The knowledge of beasts and angels lies beyond us, according to Merwin, for many reasons. Perhaps the most easily explained is the traditional one explored by Stevens, our dependence on words and naming, which by extension includes our tendency to use beasts symbolically, even as Merwin does in “Noah's Raven.” As early as “White Goat, White Ram” he indicates awareness of the problem:

                    … Mark this; for though they assume
Now the awkward postures of illustrations
For all our parables, yet the mystery they stand in
Is still as far from what they signify
As from the mystery we stand in.

(Green, p. 21)

There exist “true names” for things—as Merwin translates Porchia, “All things pronounce names”²¹—but our words block the names even as they reach toward them. In “An End in Spring” Merwin writes of the deities “that are not there,” “The centuries are named for them the names / Do not come down to us / On the way to them the words / Die” (Lice, p. 7).

But if nothing of the truth will come to us then it is with nothing that we must deal, hoping that “It is when I assent to nothing that I assent to all.”²² In extending the surrealist habit of concretizing abstractions like silence and death, Merwin constantly reifies nothing, writing, for instance, of lakes “Into which nothing keeps dropping like a stone” (Target, p. 31), or affirming its negative physical presence by an opposed negation: “I will not bow in the middle of the room / To the statue of nothing” (Target, p. 55). So when a negating poem like “February” ends “I know nothing / learn of me” (Carrier, p. 51), we are prepared to accept the paradox. Spiritual knowledge begins with an intimate awareness of nothing. In “The Saint of the Uplands” the holiness of the teacher is defined in negative terms which immediately acquire a positive resonance. Teaching from the richness of “my ignorance” the saint leads a people “born to stones” to recognition that there is no teaching, only learning: “You have ignorance of your own, I said”:

I taught them nothing.
Everywhere
The eyes are returning under the stones. And over
My dry bones they build their churches, like wells.

(Target, p. 17)

Here “nothing” may be understood literally—the saint's talent consists simply of turning disciples back on their own undiscovered knowledge—but it must also be understood paradoxically, for he teaches them what he knows. A similar ambiguity complicates the stone imagery of the poem, since the stones are both indicators of sterility and the final locus of vision. Often Merwin, like other oracular poets, suggests that one route to revelation leads through participation in the being of stones, which approach as close to spiritual nothing as existing substance can. In “Eyes of Summer” stones are connected with vision through still another paradox; they are “the witnesses” who “day after day are blinded / so that they will forget nothing.” Here the implication that stones possess something distantly related to human consciousness is not simply figurative; in the flow of substances “All the stones have been us / and will be again” (Writings, p. 4).

In attempting to give sight to his empty-eyed disciples the saint of the uplands teaches them “to gather the dew of their nights / Into mirrors,” as Merwin employs one of the most common and deeply complex of his visionary emblems. Suggestions of revelation constantly appear in mirrors; the question constantly posed is whether “revelation” is merely reflection, the sterile revelation of narcissism. Merwin suggests that something more is possible; in “Lemuel's Blessing” the wolf prays to his savage god:

But lead me at times beside the still waters;
There when I crouch to drink let me catch a glimpse of your image
Before it is obscured with my own.

(Target, p. 8)

The mirror is a gap in ordinary vision, a vacuum which may be filled with another reality if the watcher can perceive it, knowing that the spirit he seeks—though it can occupy his own shape in the mirror—is at the same time unimaginably beyond him. When the mirror does open to the revelations of Nothing, the effect is usually ominous, especially if the watcher is not animal but man: “In the mirrors the star called Nothing / Cuts us off” (Target, p. 63).

At times these evocations of Nothing, in mirrors or elsewhere, seem repetitious and even facile, but Merwin's successful evocations of evasive fearful revelations are strangely convincing, though often deeply obscure. His most developed treatment of the image of empty spaces in the world into which vision may suddenly flare involves not mirrors but windows, used in “Forgetting” to create a sense of revelation hidden somewhere in an infinite regression. In this prose piece, seeking “the unnameable stillness that unites” the various sense perceptions of “the kingdom of change,” “we” seek something that “is ours,” is within us, but that we cannot perceive. With unusual specificity Merwin locates the emptiness that receives mystical truth at the heart of the experience of the various senses, but truth remains as unattainable as it is immediate. Of “the unnameable stillness” Merwin writes:

At the heart of change it lies unseeing, unhearing, unfeeling, unchanging, holding within itself the beginning and the end. It is ours. It is our only possession. Yet we cannot take it into our hands, which change, nor see it with our eyes, which change, nor hear it nor taste it nor smell it. None of the senses can come to it. Except backwards.

Any more than they can come to each other.
Yet they point the way.

(Miner's, p. 56)

There follows an extended metaphorical description of the attempt to follow this “way”: “we” climb a ladder to look through a sealed window in a wall, which reveals another watcher at another window, which reveals the same scene again. “Somewhere on the other side of that a voice is coming. We are the voice. But we are each of those others.” And we are also, it seems, the barrier which blocks the voice. As in the emblem of the revelation which tries to come through our reflection in the mirror, the final truth is somehow news of ourselves, blocked by ourselves. In the end of “Forgetting” “we” practice the mystical discipline of reducing all the senses (“backwards”) to “nothing,” attempting a window-like transparency of self which will allow the true voice of the central self and the world to emerge. But that transparency cannot be sustained: “Then nothing has gone. The voice must have come. Because it has gone” (Miner's, p. 58). If this is affirmation it remains cruelly faint, stated in negative and perhaps ironic terms, as Merwin's ambivalence persists. His mystical desire for intimations of absolute reality is seldom supported by the faith that traditionally sustains the mystic through the nothingness of the dark night: “what I live for I can seldom believe in” (Carrier, p. 4). But the preoccupation with intimations and possibilities is constant: “An open doorway / Speaks for me / Again” (Target, p. 97).

If the doorway often seems more blank than open, the cause is not simply the inadequacies of human naming and logic. Especially in Merwin's more recent writings it seems rather that the tantalizingly close voice of revelation is inaudible because of some human failing analogous to original sin. In Miner's Merwin creates several original sin legends, most of which suggest that man's present nature was shaped by some forgotten wound, and that man free of this injury would not be man. In “The Remembering Machines of Tomorrow” machines are developed to “recall why the spirit of man walks with a limp,” and to make men whole. But when the cure actually seems imminent “men will begin to lose their machines” (Miner's, p. 131). Although this limitation must apparently be accepted as an essential part of man, acceptance is rationally impossible, for the destructiveness the wound implies will finally become apocalyptic. The terminal destruction of animals has already begun, and Merwin appropriately suggests that original sin is simply man's evolved estrangement from the natural world, the separation from animals which will destroy us but which is still somehow the locus of final meaning:

and on a Sunday that we were severed
from the animals
with a wound that never heals
but is still the gate where the nameless
cries out

(“Their Week,” Writings, p. 22)

Even in his account of the Everyman episode, Merwin often seems as disturbed by man's arrogant manipulation of nature as by the deadly conflict between man and man. Little general love for humanity offsets the political cynicism of his article. Perhaps the coldness that we human readers feel in his poetry comes not so much from his preoccupation with psychological emptiness as from a more basic antihumanism. Even his occasional Vietnam poems, like “The Asians Dying,” in which the war is both local apocalypse and prophetic of a larger doom, tend to point more to poisoned land than dead men. And appropriately a poet whose early poetry is full of oceans feels even greater anger over violations of the sea, whether atomic tests or the slow methodical extermination of whales (whose recently recorded songs carry all the resonance of revelation that Merwin habitually suggests whenever he uses the word “song”). In “For a Coming Extinction” he takes a coolly savage satisfaction in the proposal that our driving whales to “the black garden” (Lice, p. 68) is only a logical antecedent of our own doom; man's end began when he became nature's enemy, cutting off a part of himself. The more recent poem “The Current” rather obscurely develops the same idea, describing “a thin cold current” which flows through us even though we forget “that we are water”; “yes and black flukes wave to it / from the Lethe of the whales” (Writings, p. 24).

But if the sense of our participation in the flow of natural existence involves intimations of approaching extinction for which we—because we deny and alienate ourselves from that flow—are partly responsible, there also appears in the gathering dark Merwin's usual remote suggestions of revelation:

but the eels keep trying to tell us
writing over and over in our mud
our heavenly names

(Writings, p. 24)

These lines from “The Current” suggest that in our emptiness animals may attempt messages, as plants seem to in “A Scale in May”:

Now all my teachers are dead except silence
I am trying to read what the five poplars are writing
On the void

(Lice, p. 50)

Later in “Scale” Merwin writes “If you find you no longer believe enlarge the temple.” To the extent that hope exists in Merwin's poetry of negation it is based on a sense of alien animal values. But the hope that human intellectual and psychological emptiness may somehow open to the richness of animal unknowing generally remains as faint as the hope in sheer undefined nothingness. The animals who speak in poems like “Noah's Raven,” “Lemuel's Blessing,” or “Words from a Totem Animal” seem primarily interested in preserving their distance from humans, who have little to offer them; because they are themselves apparently animal-human hybrids, or animals existing under the influence of man, they find their own difficulties in communicating with their savage gods.

Of course all Merwin's gods are even more irreducibly alien than is fashionable now. Even if it does not ultimately locate god in the mind of the visionary, much contemporary unorthodox mysticism—like orthodox mystical wisdom—tends to suggest that cosmic spiritual unity, while not dependent on individual vision, is somehow enriched by human perception of it. But the divinities Merwin imagines are as indifferent to humanity as he seems to be when in “December Night” he writes something like a basic statement of his values: “I find a single prayer and it is not for men” (Lice, p. 43). In “The Widow” men seem simply irrelevant to the larger spiritual movement of the world. Here earth is defined not as man's great mother but as the only survivor of an ancient union with man that long ago ended in opposition which like our severance from the animals meant spiritual death for man:

Not that heaven does not exist but
That it exists without us
Everything that does not need you is real
The Widow does not
Hear you and your cry is numberless

(Lice, pp. 34-35)

The poem ends not only in negative moral judgment but in existential denial of men: “numberless,” we simply do not count; divorced from the vital ground of being, man inhabits a waking dream, “invisible invisible invisible.”

Predictably, Merwin finds it almost impossible to sustain this degree of negation while continuing to develop as a poet, and especially in his more recent collections there appear incongruous flashes of light amid the rather repetitive excursions into the nothing that suggests but never conveys revelation. The last piece in Miner's is entitled “Dawn Comes to Its Mountain in the Brain,” and though its final affirmation is rather flat, it is irreducibly definite: “the sun rises with its message: Sun” (Miner's, p. 235). The reason for any affirmation at all, the reason Merwin can suggest—as he does in “The Moles”—that we may after all manage to regain contact with our “lost mothers” (Miner's, p. 119) is not immediately clear. However, the way is suggested in “Being Born Again,” which quite viscerally describes the travail of birth from a mysterious “new mother.” The present intolerable sense of pressure will lead to “a delivery from a confinement. … And the pressure has come from some other existence of myself, unknown to me or at least unnoticed, that has grown, curled in itself, until it can no longer be contained and is now undergoing a change in its very cosmos” (Miner's, p. 46).

The sense of another existence enwombed in the present one and stirring toward emergence in some cosmic change is almost commonplace among modern oracular poets. Though never so explicit as a poet like Bly, who announces the return of what he describes as Mother consciousness,²³ Merwin hints at a cycle back to the time before humans were severed from animals, a time when human existence was and will be richer than now, free of its existential “wound.” In several poems the hope for such evolution seems to counterbalance Merwin's bleak sense of the present state of man. But usually he makes it clear that the evolved consciousness will no longer be human, that the flow of evolution means the end of man:

We are the echo of the future
On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live

(“The River of Bees,” Lice, p. 33)

The eerie quality of “The Herds,” set in an ice-age landscape of voyaging animals which could as easily be pre-historic as post-apocalyptic, is created partly by the mystery of its speaker: what voice is this that uses our words to “once more celebrate our distance from men” (Lice, p. 56)? “Among stones,” under an “ancient sun,” a new world begins with a celebration of man's finish.

So if apocalypse bears revelation—and we must not forget that “apocalypse” means “revelation”—the message is not for us, is nothing to us. This is part of what “The Initiate” learns, in tears:

he is singing Not a hair
of our head do we need to take with us
into the day

(Writings, p. 105)

Nothing of ourselves can go with us “into the light.” The paradox implicit in “with us” is developed in more specifically mystical terms in “The Lantern,” a projection of human consciousness into the non-human realm of cosmic union “A little way ahead”:

for in that world nothing can break
so no one believes in the plural there
so no one believes in us there

(Writings, p. 77)

All there is one “held together by nothing” without severance or separation, and the union is “a god” who is both all different things and one thing alone, both “an image of you” and “an image of no one / carrying a lantern.” If something of man survives into this unity, perhaps a final reunion with a ground of unity that has always existed, nothing of man remains distinct in union. Unlike Bly, Merwin often suggests that there can be no psychological or emotional continuity between our being and being in the time of revelation. Usually he offers not hope but a vision.

Almost always—despite a few recent poems weakened by inadequately felt optimism about human prospects—the vision remains distant; even the animal idol of “Words from a Totem Animal” seems resigned as cycles break off before illuminations arrive:

Send me out into another life
lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way

(Carrier, p. 19)

In his latest book, Writings, Merwin's evident temptation is to produce the type of affirmation some of his critics have demanded in the past, as if in a bad time affirmation were somehow the final duty of the poet. As is apparent in some of his unsuccessful writing, Merwin must find repeated contemplation of nothing rather depleting, and misanthropy a narrow basis for poetry. But as, in our culture, the apocalypse progresses from metaphor to actual prospect, and the search for any possible poetic or spiritual affirmation becomes more desperate, Merwin will probably remain one of the few visionary poets grim enough to concentrate his vision on the “black garden,” “the Lethe of the whales,” rather than unconvincing renditions of human illumination. He is an affirmative poet for the world and for its creatures; by a certain logic he must therefore be a poet of negation for man the destroyer. If this is racial self-hatred its time has surely come. In Merwin's world, human union with animals and gods can come only through an acceptance of otherness so complete that it obliterates the doomed human self, now unable to hear the messages that might save it. To us now the gods can only be as indifferent as they are mysterious, like the immortal in “Blue”:

The dead drift past him in their gray boats but he never knew them.
                    But there is no harm in him. Over his door, where no mortal eye could read anything, it is written, “We Are All Children of the Light.”

(Miner's, p. 123)

Notes

1. The Miner's Pale Children (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 123. Further references to this and other Merwin collections will be identified parenthetically in the text. Other collections cited are: A Mask for Janus (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1952); The Dancing Bears (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954); Green with Beasts (New York: Knopf, 1956); The Drunk in the Furnace (New York: Macmillan, 1960); The Moving Target (New York: Atheneum, 1963); The Lice (New York: Atheneum, 1967); Selected Translations, 1948-1968 (New York: Atheneum, 1968); The Carrier of Ladders (New York: Atheneum, 1970); and Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (New York: Atheneum, 1973).

2. “The Snow Man,” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 9.

3. “The Writing on the Void: The Poetry of W. S. Merwin,” Iowa Review, 1 (Summer 1970), 98.

4. Alone with America (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 375. By “fewmets” Howard must mean the fragments of excrement of a hunted beast which lead trackers to the kill. So T. H. White uses the term (to refer to dragon droppings, which are few indeed) in The Once and Future King.

5. In American Poetry Since 1945 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) Stephen Stepanchev connects Merwin with these “subjective image” poets (p. 119).

6. “A Note on Antonio Porchia,” Voices, trans. W. S. Merwin (Chicago: Big Table, 1969), p. 8.

7. “Act of Conscience,” Nation, December 29, 1962, p. 477.

8. “Notes on ‘The Waste Land,’” The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), p. 51.

9. Gross, p. 105. [See note 3, above.]

10. In “Myth in the Poetry of W. S. Merwin,” Alice N. Benston points out that an earlier form of this is the Psyche myth (Poets in Progress, ed. Edward Hungerford [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1962], p. 184).

11. In “The Poetry of W. S. Merwin,” Kenneth Andersen lists Merwin's publications but simply fails to mention Janus. This seems all the more odd because his essay appears in Twentieth Century Literature, 1 (October 1970), 278-85, a journal usually marked by almost obsessive attention to bibliographical thoroughness.

12. The original Spanish and Bly's version come from his Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon, 1971), pp. 28, 29. Merwin's version comes from Translations, p. 88.

13. “With Pale Women in Maryland,” Silence in the Snowy Fields (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1962), p. 32.

14. Seventies, 1 (Spring 1972), 31. This issue of Bly's exceedingly irregular journal—the only one so far this decade—with its fine collection of Spanish poems, American poems, and “eccentric” brilliant theoretical prose by Bly, is an invaluable introduction to contemporary surrealism and its antecedents. Maybe if enough people buy this one Bly will put out another.

15. Seventies, p. 30.

16. “Foreword,” Transparence of the World, trans. W. S. Merwin (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. vi.

17. Stevens, p. 9. [See note 2, above.]

18. “Saying No,” Iowa Review, 4 (Summer 1973), 84.

19. The Modern Poets (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), p. 262.

20. Silence in the Snowy Fields, p. 29. [See note 13, above.]

21. Voices, p. 64. Merwin has placed this aphorism last in the collection.

22. Ibid., p. 16.

23. See his essay “I Came Out of the Mother Naked,” Sleepers Joining Hands (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 27-50.