[In the following essay, Frazier explores the almost disembodied character of many of Merwin's narrators and suggests that the poet uses them in order to tell a story without the burden of ego.]

The search for an original, natural world—or origin—is perhaps the single most distinct topic to be found in the poetry of W. S. Merwin since the The Carrier of Ladders (1970). To achieve the participation in nature that they desire, Merwin's narrators betray little or no personal identity and often seem as if they are voices speaking free of the body. These “disembodied” narrators lack a particular self so that they may make their quests without the burdens of the ego. In the vast majority of Merwin's poems, their actions remain part of a journey or process, far from restoration of origin. But this is not to say that their efforts are futile. Disembodiment aids them in avoiding realities that are restrictive; that is, it helps them to make steps toward origin and it translates the experience more readily to the reader. All of this corresponds to psychoanalytic discussion of symbolic death and rebirth in the landscape; however, “death” and “rebirth” need not always signify regression toward a primal parent but, rather, may indicate exploratory steps toward plenitude.

Charles Molesworth notes Merwin's prevalent use of a disembodied narrative agent and believes that the disembodiment typically appears figuratively or as a desire toward such a state because the speaker sees the world as “irremediably fallen, so that to be entangled in materiality is synonymous with evil” (152). Molesworth also sees this technique as a method of gaining knowledge metaphysically, a knowledge not available to those in the body. Though I disagree with Molesworth's estimation that a “kind of rarified second-degree allegory” unsuccessfully runs through Merwin's work, he nevertheless brings up a valuable point when he notes Merwin's attempts to remove himself from a physical circumstance that is imperfect (148).

One short poem from The Carrier of Ladders, “Lark,” presents a speaker who wants to get out of the body, who wants to relieve himself of his humanity in his desire for a more integrated being and understanding. Merwin begins the poem by addressing the lark, but by the second stanza the subject of the wished-for transformation has become the narrator:

In the hour that has no friends
above it
you become yourself
voice
black
star burning in cold heaven
speaking well of it
as it falls from you
upward
Fire
by day
with no country
where and at what height
can it begin
I the shadow
singing I
the light

(38)

The speaker disembodies himself by taking himself out of charted time and into “the hour that has no friends” and by taking himself out of the world and into the “cold heaven,” which is no traditional heaven but merely another uncharted realm “with no country.” Merwin's scheme is to remove the body from spatial and temporal restrictions in order to liberate the spirit. Though many critics see Merwin's disembodied voice as yet another manifestation of his occasional gloom, here and in many other poems the loss of self works toward a spiritual fulfillment. But the desired spirituality also reflects Merwin's usual paradoxical mode: it must be both “shadow” and “light.” When the speaker ends this future journey out of the self and into a more direct contact with the universe, we are not quite sure where he is. Our best prediction may be to say that he will be in no place and in no time. The loss of the body, the plunge to the essential self, is part of a process, a continually ongoing effort that seldom finds its end.

Through disembodiment, Merwin tears away from his narrators nearly everything that would allow us to identify them. Lacking outward identity, the narrators are subsequently liberated to express their desire to join the self with the universal. Yet, as in “Lark,” the universal that Merwin seeks to attain is experienced through only a few elements at any one moment, as opposed to the universe for which Whitman reaches, one that contains as much as the poet can enumerate. Merwin attempts his encounters with spareness and concentration; in this, similarities may be drawn to Thoreau and, oddly, to Dickinson. His process, as of those writers of the nineteenth century, is metaphysical, although his teleology is not.

Part of Merwin's mission here, as Neal Bowers notes, is to imitate myth and avoid the conventions of “the breath, the pulse, or the movements of the mind” that characterize the poetry of most of his contemporaries. To reach outward situates the self in the universe, and not vice versa. On the question of structure, Bowers categorizes Merwin as a free-form formalist, observing that in one poem the poet makes ample use of alliteration, assonance, repetition, and self-contained syntactic units (249). Merwin's use of traditional poetic devices places his work within the long historical chain of lyrical poetry, while his imagery and subjects drive its character toward fable.

In this mythical and lyrical mode, “Apples” describes only a few images in a surreal manner in the speaker's encounter with the world. We know nothing of the speaker of the poem, whose literal and metaphorical awakening occurs in a place once inhabited by others and redolent of their ignorance of the meaning of original song:

Waking beside a pile of unsorted keys
in an empty room
the sun is high
what a long jagged string of broken bird song
they must have made as they gathered there
by the ears deaf with sleep
and the hands empty as waves

(The Compass Flower 10)

Remembering the “birds,” the speaker strives to discover the means to bring back their song. The birds are keys to a natural world he has lost and whose meaning remains hidden: “I remember the birds now / but where are the locks // when I touch the pile / my hand sounds like a wave on a shingle beach” (10). He realizes that the sounds he makes are merely echoes, like “someone stirring / in the ruins of a glass mountain / after decades” (10). Or, to phrase it another way, he recognizes his division from the original natural world, the mysterious liminal remembrance of origin.

Understanding comes at the end of the poem, when all of the keys to living “melt” under the narrator's touch except one, “to the door of a cold morning / the color of apples” (10). The speaker's link to nature, to an early, mythical world, is slight, but it is present. The “cold morning” contains a “door,” a symbol of opportunity recurring frequently in Merwin's poems. “Apples” has a well-known classical basis in the tale of the golden apples of the Hesperides as well as a common identification with the fruit of the Eden story. The poem's mythic reverberations allow Merwin to enter into a brief narration without concentrating on a local self. While the narrator moves through the poem's landscape, the implications of his observations point toward a larger world.

It is also a disembodied narrator in “Midnight in Early Spring” who must recognize the remnants of origin among the barrenness of the present. We know nothing more of the narrator than we know of the “us” as he discerns that the happenings around him are omens:

At one moment a few old leaves come in
frightened
and lie down together and stop moving
the nights now go in threes
as in a time of danger
the flies
sleep like sentries on the darkened panes
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

(The Carrier of Ladders 75)

That revelation from nature may arrive in awe- or fear-inspiring circumstances has long been a tradition in romantic literature, as evidenced by the famous boat scene in Wordsworth's Prelude and the harrowing experiences of Coleridge's mariner. Eliot's The Waste Land brings this motif to the modern day through the grim landscape of the first section, which later serves as the scene of a soft-spoken prophecy.

In the second half of the poem, the speaker addresses the revelation as if it were a human:

who were you
cold voice born in captivity
rising
last martyr of a hope
last word of a language
last son
other half of grief
who were you

(75)

His repeated question, “who were you,” is one we could equally ask of the speaker in the present tense: “who are you?” But the speaker does not exist in the poem to identify himself; rather, he is there to serve as listener, and as a good listener he knows that original unity must be heard if any liberation in the future is to take place: “so that we may know why / when the streams / wake tomorrow and we are free” (75). Although Merwin describes such restoration positively, since in most of his poetry he is unconvinced of its happening, we should not infer that he is certain here. Restoration of origin can no more be predicted than can the ecological future of the planet. Here, the voice of the ancient complements the apocalyptic position often taken by Merwin. In short, we may say that Merwin's poetry is filled with earthly beginnings and endings that have at their root the same purpose: in writing about potential tragic endings, the poet hopes to help prevent them; in seeking beginnings, he hopes to bring their value to the calamitous present day.

Merwin's desire for what is very close to a mystical union with the living world is regarded by Laurence Lieberman, as well as by Molesworth, as a key indicator of the poet's philosophical end. To Lieberman, Merwin's impersonal narrators are evidence of his longing to become “a tool, an instrument, a pure vehicle for the ‘one truth,’ the vision that suddenly fills the fertile, incubating emptiness” in which the spirit is free from human needs. This freedom is the condition of self-purification and independence that allows for the reception of images from the subconscious mind or from the racial preconscious. Furthermore, Lieberman states, it has its role for Merwin the translator since it establishes a “psychic medium for the poetry of foreign tongues” (603).

The concept of self-emptying in order to attain religious enlightenment and even identification with the “one truth” or deity is common among religions of the East. Contrasting the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to those of the East, Joseph Campbell remarks that in the latter a principle of identification with the divinity through self-loss is often professed. Loss of self leads not to negation but, on the contrary, to transcendence:

Gods and Buddhas, in the Orient are, accordingly, not final terms—like Yahweh, the Trinity, or Allah, in the West—but point beyond themselves to that ineffable being, consciousness, and rapture that is the All in all of us. And in their worship, the ultimate aim is to effect in the devotee a psychological transfiguration through a shift of his plane of vision from the passing to the enduring, through which he may come finally to realize in experience (not simply as an article of faith) that he is identical with that before which he bows.

(197-98)

The individual's “shift of his plane of vision” out of the present and the identification of the self (which is paradoxically suspended) with an original world (which must serve in place of the absent deity) is what Merwin attempts. The end of the effort has necessarily been secularized and “naturalized” for this postmodern poet of the earth, but the concept remains analogous.

The impersonal, lone narrators that Merwin employs are the best vehicles for the delivery of these often prophetic and prayer-like poems. Separate from the everyday world and all of its strictures, Merwin's speakers are something like wandering prophets, able to hear the voice in the desert since they apparently have no strong ties to the world. Sometimes, however, although these speakers have made themselves available to such intuition or intimations, they also have a tinge of fatalism about them. Merwin's listeners may seem astonished at finding themselves in their position as readers of the universe. When, in one poem, the narrator says, “This must be what I wanted to be doing, / Walking at night between the two deserts, / Singing,” the lines ring with surprise rather than certainty (The Moving Target 50).

Usually, the narrators appear more willing, and often they are active seekers of knowledge. What stops this poetry short of being truly prophetic is that the narrators generally come away with only intimations rather than large answers. The poems close with the sense of the speakers having acquired a small parcel of knowledge in a world filled with questions. But the narrators also seem as if they will continue their wandering, carrying their small packages.

This standard partial illumination, coupled with the disembodied speaker, is apparent in “To the Rain” (from Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment), where understanding is sought during a shower of rain. As in “Apples,” the physical circumstance is described in a fashion as elliptical as the speaker's character. Of the rain, we know only that it is ancient, colorless, and nameless:

You reach me out of the age of the air
clear
falling toward me
each one new
if any of you has a name
it is unknown
but waited for you here
that long
for you to fall through it knowing nothing

(95)

The narrator does not identify himself as the one who has “waited” for the rain, nor does he make it clear that he is the one who has known “nothing.” This ambiguity, achieved through the dissociation of subject and modifier, intensifies the sketchiness of the speaker. By not providing the proper connections between himself and his actions in this passage, he appears almost as ephemeral as the rain, and he seems ready to make an ontological move.

Addressing the rain as “hem of the garment”—a reference to the biblical stories of people who touched the hem of Jesus's garment in order to be healed—and repeating his wish to love what he cannot know, the speaker picks up the personal pronoun again: “hem of the garment / do not wait / until I can love all that I am to know / for maybe that will never be” (95). Willing to forgo logical and emotional preludes, he admits his self-distrust, and self-loss must take over in order for him to proceed. His admission that he is in a lost state may, through its release of the ego, lead to understanding:

touch me this time
let me love what I cannot know
as the man born blind may love color
until all that he loves
fills him with color

(95)

The request for “touch” mixes the language of the body into the poem, but only enough to prevent it from slipping into abstraction. Phenomenological progress, not earthly absorption, is the immediate goal of the work. Atonement with the body may come later, after the self has been allowed its atonement with the larger universe.

Questing speakers are common to twentieth-century poetry, yet the particular impersonality of Merwin's figures sets them apart from others. Jarold Ramsey observes that modern parallels to Merwin's searching might be found in Lowell and Roethke, but that their journeys are influenced by psychological factors, whereas Merwin's are largely free of the personal. Other than the poems about his family, which appeared in the fifties and early sixties, Merwin's work largely avoids personal detail, but manages to acquire a directness nevertheless (36-37). To these poems we should add a few more (some of which have appeared since Ramsey's essay): the family poems in Opening the Hand such as “Sun and Rain” and “Strawberries” and those in The Rain in the Trees such as “The Salt Pond.” Though the dominant mode of the middle of our century, the confessionalism of Lowell, Plath, and Sexton stands in contrast to Merwin's existentialism. While Merwin may have his moments of “confession,” it would be difficult to imagine his poetry without the reach outward.

Instead of characterization, disembodiment is put into play for the directness of experience it allows. And, as Ramsey states, this impersonality leads to a message with more widespread availability: “Thus the task of self-orientation is made that much more difficult, one would think, but its successful completion in poetry that much more capable of universality of meaning by not being composed of personalized details” (36-37).

The abandonment of the personal, the self-emptying of Eastern religions also shares strong affinities with some of the beliefs of the Native Americans Merwin has studied and translated. In the traditional Native American vision quest, an individual cuts himself loose from the bonds of the tribe and its support in order to experience the spiritual. Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa), a Santee Sioux from among the last generation to be raised in the traditional manner and an author of numerous books on the Sioux, relates that in the first hambeday, or religious retreat of the youth, the individual seeks out the highest summit in a region but takes with him no material objects other than those of symbolic value (154). Similarly, in everyday life, “all matters of personal or selfish concern” are considered to be of the “lower” or “material” mind (155).

Sam Fathers, the aged half-black, half-Chickasaw mentor of young Ike McCaslin in Faulkner's “The Bear,” from Go Down, Moses, instructs Ike that if he is ever to encounter a legendary bear of the north Mississippi woods he must leave behind the accoutrements of civilization. Although literally a hunt, the search for the bear—for this particular bear, which is itself mythical—takes on the value of a spiritual journey in the same sense as the hambeday. At first, Ike leaves behind only his object of physical threat to the bear, a gun, but as he progresses on his journey through the woods he realizes that even his watch, compass, and walking stick may stand in the way of engagement: “Then he relinquished completely to it. It was the watch and the compass. He was still tainted. He removed the linked chain of the one and the looped thong of the other from his overalls and hung them on a bush and leaned the stick beside them and entered it” (208).

Just as Faulkner's boy-protagonist must free himself of human devices, so must Merwin's narrators free themselves of the attributes of the personal. In the story, the release to the wilderness brings about the presence of the bear, with its overtones of the visionary, however Faulkner struggles against it: “Then he saw the bear. It did not emerge, appear; it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon's hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless against the dappled obscurity, looking at him” (209).

This extremely rare visionary moment in Faulkner is also rare in Merwin, yet it does periodically happen. Merwin's “Little Horse” actually presents a speaker in the presence of an archetypal figure from origin, much like Faulkner's bear. The opening stanzas of “Little Horse” indicate the speaker's longing for origin, his long-felt sense that something unidentifiable has been missing and a sort of personal “lostness”:

You come from some other forest
do you
little horse
think how long I have known these
deep dead leaves
without meeting you
I belong to no one
I would have wished for you if I had known how
what a long time the place was empty

(The Carrier of Ladders 54)

His willingness to meet the horse on its own terms and, as in “Finding a Teacher,” to refrain from demanding answers is the openmindedness that those on a quest must demonstrate:

what can I show you
I will not ask you if you will stay
or if you will come again
I will not try to hold you
I hope you will come with me to where I stand
often sleeping and waking
by the patient water
that has no father nor mother

(54)

Merwin's vision may even go so far as to psychically incorporate the individual with the natural as in “The Biology of Art”: “after a long time you look down / into a valley without a name / after a long time as water you look up” (The Rain in the Trees 75).

The processes involving the exchange of nutrients, water, and vapors among the living beings of the planet and the exchange of elements among the nonliving are real, biochemical transfers constantly being enacted. Plants take up water, but they also release it through transpiration. Plants absorb the soil's nutrients, but these are returned in the decay of organic matter. Carbon dioxide enters the plant; oxygen exits it. This is but one very simplified sketch of biological exchange, which is to say nothing of the transfers going on, for example, within and among soils, the air, or rivers, or of the subatomic transfers of all matter. Interaction is vital to the existence of the earth, and not unlike the self-loss of Buddhism or the journey out of the material in the Native American vision quest, Merwin's mythologized disembodiment has as one model the concrete and ongoing movement of molecules. Parts of the planet do not exist in isolation from one another, and phenomenological growth also demands fluidity.

The persons whom Merwin chooses to narrate the poems of origin are not as detailed as the specific individuals one might find in a long narrative poem, nor are they the particular egos of the confessional school whose psychological idiosyncrasies we cannot escape. They appear in circumstances that evoke myth, and their search for origin takes on its own mythic significance. Without the self, without the body, they are free to move through the natural world and to seek out its beginnings, whose remnants are all they are usually able to discover in a fallen modern world.

Works Cited

Bowers, Neal. “W. S. Merwin and Postmodern American Poetry.” The Sewanee Review 98 (1990): 246-59.

Campbell, Joseph. The Flight of the Wild Gander. 1951. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990.

Eastman, Charles Alexander (Ohiyesa). The Soul of the Indian. Masterpieces of American Indian Literature. Ed. Willis Regier. New York: MJF Books, 1993. 143-91.

Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses and Other Stories. New York: Random, 1942.

Lieberman, Laurence. “New Poetry: The Church of Ash.” Rev. of Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment, by W. S. Merwin. The Yale Review 62 (1973): 602-13.

Merwin, W. S. The Carrier of Ladders. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

———. The Compass Flower. New York: Atheneum, 1977.

———. The Moving Target. New York: Atheneum, 1963.

———. The Rain in the Trees. New York: Knopf, 1988.

———. Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment. New York: Atheneum, 1973.

Molesworth, Charles. “W. S. Merwin: Style, Vision, Influence.” W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. 145-58.

Ramsey, Jarold. “The Continuities of W. S. Merwin: ‘What Has Escaped Us, We Bring with Us.’” W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. 19-44.